After completing his first year in charge of the Jurisdiction of Asheville, and after a careful study of the manifold problems peculiar to it, Bishop Cheshire was convinced that the erection of the missionary jurisdiction was "an act of wise and prudent statesmanship." He thought that a missionary who had the oversight of three or four counties sorely needed regular visitations from the bishop, and in his opinion the work could be more effectively carried on if the bishop were able to remain a week or more with each missionary. He pressed these points upon the members of the House of Bishops in strongly advocating the election of a bishop for the Jurisdiction. Finally, in the fall of 1898, the House of Bishops elected the Rev. Junius Moore Horner, a native North Carolinian, as missionary bishop of the Jurisdiction of Asheville. He was consecrated on December 28, 1898, in Trinity Church, Asheville, with Bishop Cheshire as the consecrator. After this service Bishop Cheshire formally turned over to Bishop Horner the full administration of the Jurisdiction. Turning now to a wholly different phase of Bishop Cheshire's work, we take up one of the most important achievements of his long episcopate, the establishment of St. Mary's School for girls as a church institution. This school had been founded in Raleigh by Dr. Aldert Smedes in 1842, and had been nurtured and maintained, through good and hard times, by its founder and his son and successor, Dr. Bennett Smedes. St. Mary's was not a church school, but its two rectors had been Episcopal clergymen, and thus the institution had been under the exclusive influence of the Episcopal Church. By 1896 Dr. Bennett Smedes was finding it very difficult to compete with publicly supported and privately endowed schools. At this time he made it known that he could no longer continue St. Mary's as a private school. The Alumnae Association of St. Mary's at once took action to preserve the school for the church. It sent a memorial to the diocesan convention of 1896, in which it appealed to the Episcopal Church in North Carolina "either to endow the School, or to erect for it suitable buildings in Raleigh or elsewhere, and thus relieve it of one great drain, its heavy rent." The appeal met with sympathetic attention from Bishop Cheshire. Only the year before, he had remarked to the convention: "I have been, from earliest childhood, brought up to look upon St. Mary's School, at Raleigh, as the most valuable of all our church institutions or agencies in North Carolina.... I cannot too highly recommend this school to the confidence of all the people of North Carolina."