Leonidas Polk Family Papers

Mr. Toastmaster, Bishop Donegan, Bishop Boynton, Dr. McCrady, Right Reverend, Very Reverend and Reverend Sirs, General Crittenberger, Mr. Duncan, Members of the John H.P. Hodgson Chapter of the Associated Alumni of the University of the South, Gentlemen of Sewanee, and distinguished guests:

I have always known that my brother, the Suffragan Bishop of New York, was a man of wide experience but I had never realized until this evening the extent and the intimacy of his contacts in Ireland!

In the year 1839 when Bishop Polk was making his first episcopal visitation as Missionary Bishop of the Southwest, it is recorded that he had some rough experiences. The Republic of Texas had at that time a reputation for being a place of refuge for insolvent debtors and fugitives from justice, and the Bishop was suspected of belonging to one or the other of those classes. A rough and ready Texan, hearing that the Bishop was one of the Polks of Tennessee, said to him, "Well, stranger, if it is a fair question, I would give a heap to know what brought you here!"

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Alabama, Louisiana, and what was then the Republic of Texas. Responsibility for the last-mentioned of these territories made Leonidas Polk the first foreign Missionary Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

In the course of his first missionary journey, in March, 1839, the Bishop crossed the Red River, passed over into the disputed territory between Texas and the United States, visited pplanters, and then embarked by boat for Shreveport, Louisiana. Accommodations for passengers were lacking, but a fur trader loaned him a bear rug to sleep on. Every day this trader took an observation of the sun to be sure of the hour of the day and then read his Bible to be sure that he was reading it at the same hour as his wife at home. On the trip down the river the ship struck a partially submerged snag and should have had not the Bishop suggested to the ship's captain how to raise it. Then the fur trader and the Bishop, embarking on another ship while the other waited for repairs, proceeded to their destination. At Shreveport