In Ages Past The Apostle of Ohio: Bishop Edward Fenwick, O.P. By
1800, Americans were moving westward by the thousands, settling
the untamed backwoods of Kentucky. Barely a generation had
passed since Daniel Boone guided the first white settlers there.
Only a few years earlier had the bloody Indian wars ended. Here,
in 1805, the centuries-old Dominican Order established its first
house in North America, a simple log-cabin like the one Abraham
Lincoln would be born in a few years later. Its founder was
Edward Fenwick: teacher, pastor, frontier missionary, and Ohio's
first Catholic bishop. Fenwick was born far from the frontier on
a Maryland plantation, on August 19, 1768, and was baptized in
the family's private chapel. The Fenwicks were an old English
Catholic family that settled in Maryland, the birthplace of
American Catholicism, during the 1600s. Of the thirteen original
colonies, only there did Catholics exist in any sizeable number;
only there could they freely practice their faith. During the
American R