Bishop E. R. Ames, visited Oregon and on March 17, organized the Oregon Annual Conference which included the territory of Oregon and Washington. This Conference held its first session at Salem, and made appointments of 22 ministers including all those named above, and the following—Gustavus Hines, Harvey K. Hines, T. F. Royal, G. M. Berry, E. Garrison, B. Close, and W. B. Morse. The second annual Conference was held at the Belknap settlement on the Long Tom River, in Benton County. It was presided over by the greatest Bishop of the Church—Matthew Simpson. His journey to Oregon in 1854 including a sea trip from New York to Panama; a journey across the Isthmus; shipwrecked upon the Pacific sailing north; transfer to a vessel which brought him in safety to Portland; thence to Salem by a primitive river steamboat; thence to Corvallis by a wagon ride (for which in passing it may be noted that he paid $30.00); thence on horseback with his satchel on his saddle horn; thence five miles to the log house in which the sessions of the conference were held. It is recorded that this school house "stood on the top of a butte, in a great measure surrounded by sloughs and nearly a mile from any house."
The determined Bishop, nothing daunted, went at once to the rude platform, detailed his experience in storm, shipwreck, mud and darkness, with marvelous pathos; quoted the .stanzas of a well known hymn of Henry Kirk White, beginning:
Once on the raging sea I rode,
The storm was loud, the night was dark;
The ocean yawned and rudely blowed
The wind that tossed my foundering bark.
Deep horror then my vitals froze.
Death struck, I ceased the tide to stem;
When suddenly a star arose;
It was the star of Bethlehem.
The first Protestant church building on the Pacific Coast was the Methodist church at Oregon City, begun in 1842, by A. F. Waller, and completed in 1844 by Gustavus Hines. Governor Abernethy added the bell in 1851. Abernethy also at that time purchased three smaller bells for the Methodists, one for the church in Salem, one for the church in Portland, and one for the Clackamas Academy at Oregon City. But these were not the first bells in Oregon, the Catholics having one at Champoeg in a temporary arbor like chapel, where they held religious services as early as 1836. Religious services were held in Salem, by the Methodists as early as 1841, in the Chapel of the Oregon Institute which served for church purposes until the erection of the Church building which was dedicated January 23, 1853; and was at that time the best Protestant Church building in Oregon. The Methodist church of Portland was organized in 1848, and its first building built mainly by the hands of its firet pastor—James H. Wilbur—one of the greatest of the Methodist leaders in Oregon.
The Methodists were foremost in propagating their principles by means of schools. At the first annual meeting of the Methodist society in Oregon, in May 1841, a committee was appointed to select a location for a manual labor school. The site chosen was in what is now North Salem of the State Capital. And here a building costing in those days, ten thousand dollars, was erected, and an
