Frontier Bishop

This book, written by Dr. Worth Marion Tippy in 1958, is a biography of Robert Richford Roberts (1778-1843), an American Methodist Circuit Rider, Pastor, Presiding Elder, and the first married man in America to serve as Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, elected in 1816.

Born in Frederick County, Maryland, his family were communicants of The Church of England. In 1785, they moved to the Ligonier Valley in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, where Roberts united with the M.E. Church when he was fourteen years old. Until he was twenty-one, his was a thoroughly frontier existence, with few books and quite simple habits. Despite becoming one of the “foremost religious leaders of his time,” he remained a frontiersman to the day of his death in 1843.

“Long after he became a bishop he liked to follow deer in the forest. When he was free, being now a bishop, to live where he chose, he established his episcopal residence in what was then wilderness of the hill country of southern Indiana. Here, in utmost seclusion, he lived for the next quarter century, at first under most primitive conditions. From this isolated place he left on horseback on his amazing episcopal journeys to all parts of the nation, returning after long absences to work on his lands.”

Dr. Tippy tells of Bishop Roberts’ move from his native Maryland to the then-frontier of western Pennsylvania, where his father had secured four hundred acres of land in the Ligonier Valley fifty miles east of Pittsburgh, and where the young Roberts would go on to experience the hardships and adventures of migrants before and after him—experiences which “better prepared for the leadership which came to him so early in life.”

An invaluable read.