Family Stories Yesterday

Catholics Connections in Kentucky

Catholic Maryland

Maryland has a rich Catholic history, having been chartered by English Catholics on the principle of religious freedom. The first adventurers arrived in 1634 on the merchant ships Ark and Dove, and promptly celebrated Mass. A 40-foot tall cross on St. Clement’s Island on the lower Potomac River commemorates the site and event. Within 20 years English Puritans had seized political control of the colony, imposing restrictions on Catholic Masses and sacraments, Catholic civic participation, and ever-increasing persecution for much of the next century. When religious tolerance finally returned in the 1760s, Maryland still boasted nearly 16,000 Catholics, the largest group anywhere in the thirteen colonies.1 At the close of the Revolutionary War, Maryland-native Rev. John Carroll was named superior of American missions by the Vatican. He would eventually be elevated to bishop of the newly-formed Diocese of Baltimore, whose region included all the English-speaking colonies and territories.

St. Mary’s County

Southern Maryland is a peninsula bounded by the Potomac River to the west and the Chesapeake Bay to the south and east. St. Mary’s County forms the lower neck of that peninsula, which still retains a hardy Catholic and agricultural character. The name Thompson does not appear on either the Ark or Dove 1634 manifests.2 However, family trees assert that many with that surname already lived in Southern Maryland by the mid 1600s. The Revolutionary War brought hardship to St. Mary’s County. British warships controlled the Chesapeake Bay, commandeering produce, livestock, and other supplies at will. Economic difficulties continued after the war.

Fifteen “Thompson” Households are enumerated in the 1790 St. Mary’s County, Maryland census. Household heads include three named “Joseph,” one “Bennett,” and one “John”(see below).

A Vast, Unclaimed Wilderness

A post-war census lists fifteen “Thompson” households among perhaps 2500 families in St. Mary’s County. The population subsequently decreased by about 20% between 1790 and 1810,3 as a significant number of theses families followed earlier Maryland Catholic pioneers like William and Jane (Greenleaf) Coombes and Dr. George Hart into an extensive wilderness beyond the Appalachian Mountains. “The new country was portrayed as a sort of promised land, with an exuberant and fertile soil; and, if not flowing with milk and honey, at least teeming with wild game…. In the brief space of seventeen years – between 1775 and 1792 – Kentucky, from being a vast unclaimed wilderness, became a state of the Union!4 Jane Coombes is considered the first teacher in what was then Kentucky County, Virginia, and George Hart the first physician.5

Intentional Communities

For mutual support and protection, a league of Catholic families from St. Mary’s County pledged to form an intentional Catholic community on Pottinger’s Creek, north of the current town of Loretto and south of what would shortly become the Nelson County seat of Bardstown. The first Catholic church in Kentucky, Holy Cross, was erected at the Pottinger Creek settlement in 1785. The name “Thompson” appears among pioneer landowner Philmer Lee‘s neighbors there and previously in Southern Maryland.6 In 1786 a separate community was founded about 10 miles southwest of Holy Cross on Hardin’s Creek (near modern Lebanon). Among these Catholics were a Bennett Thompson and a John Thompson.6 The Hardin Creek community eventually built the parish church of St. Charles. By 1787, about fifty Catholic families were eking out a living in the vicinity. Although there were then perhaps only 20 ordained clergy in the entirety of the newly-independent United States, Rev. Carroll soon sent a priest to minister to the Kentucky faithful. By 1791, six distinct Catholic communities had spread throughout “Kentucky’s Holy Land”: current Nelson, Marion, and Washington Counties.

In 1808, four new American Catholic dioceses were formed: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Bardstown, the latter embracing all of the Northwest territories. By 1811, there were 6,000 Catholics, eight priests, about 10 churches or chapels, and perhaps 30 additional mission communities in central Kentucky.3 Seminaries and religious orders followed, including Cistercian Trappist monks from France and the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth from Maryland.7 Catherine Spalding, a colleague of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and a pioneer of Kentucky social work, led the latter order in starting schools, an orphanage, and a hospital. Catherine’s relatives included future bishops Martin J. Spalding and John L. Spalding, fellow Kentuckians who appear elsewhere in our family stories.

Patriot Joseph Thompson

Some in St. Mary’s County were awarded bounty land for Revolutionary War service. Joseph Thompson (1750-1803) and his wife Nancy Ann (Elgin, 1761-1804) had 1000 acres of bounty land surveyed in Joseph’s name on the Green River in 1792. The river was as much as 120 miles removed from the county seat in Bardstown, and thus from fellow Catholics and the sacraments. Joseph and Nancy, with at least four children, traveled to Kentucky, but the parents died in Washington County, a few miles east of Bardstown, and far from the Green River.

Nelson County (4) in 1785. Map shows approximate locations of Lexington (LX), Louisville (LV), Bardstown (BT), Loretto (LO), and Curdsville (CV). The Green River was the western and southern boundary separating Nelson County from Lincoln County (3). Source: Rootsweb.com, “Historical Map of KY, 1785-86”

Thompson Descendants

More research will be required to pinpoint the precise location of the bounty land. However, descendants of Joseph and Nancy farmed land on the Green River near the community of Curdsville in what is now Daviess County (est. 1815). Portions may remain in the family to this day. Joseph and Nancy’s son Charles Thompson (1789-1836) married fellow former-Marylander Jane Nevitt (1789-1836) in Kentucky in 1814. They would have been too young to settle on the 1792 Green River survey, though they may have claimed an unimproved portion from relatives in the 1810s. Both are buried at the historic Holy Cross cemetery near Loretto. The first Catholic church in Daviess County was not erected until 1831. The 1840 census affirms that Charles and Jane’s sons Leo Thompson (1818-1873) and Cyril Thompson (1820-1902) farmed the Curdsville land in 1840. Both are buried in the nearby St.. Alphonsus parish cemetery.

My wife Jean’s dad Joe Thompson was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, the Daviess County seat, thirteen miles east of the farmland tended by his 2nd great-grandfather Leo, great-grandfather Benjamin (1857-1940), and grandfather Francis (1893-1971). Joe’s American Catholic heritage goes back much further of course, ten generations and nearly 400 years through the early years of the commonwealth of Kentucky to the founding of the Catholic colony of Maryland. May it continue so until Jesus comes again.

1 Bunson, Matthew, “America’s Catholic Colony.” https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/americas-catholic-colony accessed 12/9/24

2 “Passengers and Crew of the Ark and Dove,” The Society of the Ark and Dove, https://socarkdove.org/adventurer accessed 12/12/24

3 Zwicker, Robert and John Stewart, “The Kentucky Migration,” https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~slhessick/genealogy/peakes04.htm accessed 12/19/2024

4 Spalding, Martin J., “Sketches of the early Catholic Missions of Kentucky,” (1844, republished 1972, Arno Publishing) pg. 22, 31, 42, 183, 190

5 Stone, May, “Education in the Early Days of Kentucky,” Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society Vol. 39 No. 129, (October 1941) pgs. 400-406 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23372137 accessed 12/9/24

6 Webb, Ben J., “The Centenary of Catholicity in Kentucky” (1884, Charles A. Rogers) pg. 28, 56

7 Crews, Fr. Clyde F., “Early Catholicism in Kentucky” https://www.archlou.org/about-the-archdiocese/history/ accessed 12/9/24

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