In 1765, Father Hunter began the arduous duties of a priest whose flock was scattered over uncounted miles of wilderness; and even before that, perhaps, the whole county, which embraced all that is now known as Western Maryland, was one parish of the Established Church, with All Saints’ for its centre. Her clergymen had an annual revenue of five thousand pounds, and this rich plum was given to one or another of the beneficed clergy who too often disgraced the reign of the early Georges. The most notorious of all the New World incumbents was, perhaps, the Rev. Bennett Allen, who came to All Saints’ in 1768, greatly against the will of the people. On the first Sunday after his arrival the vestrymen left the church in a body. A peace-making worshipper ventured up to the pulpit with a remonstrance, only to be met with a drawn pistol in the clerical hand, and an oathful threat of immediate happy despatch if he interfered with the service. That his wild career included the murder of one Dulany in a duel, and the plotted assassination of another, and that he died an unknown, drunken outcast of London streets, is the shameful and pitiful ending of this o’ertrue tale. That he has been succeeded by a long line of devout and godly men has long ago effaced the stain he left upon the parish annals. [Illustration: PROSPECT HALL. THE DULANY MANSION.] Some miles to the northeast of the town a young man, Robert Strawbridge by name, who had imbibed the doctrines of the Wesleys, formed a class after their ideas in 1764, which Bishop Asbury said was “the first in Maryland and America.” The small log chapel which they built antedated any other Methodist meeting-house in America by three years, which gives the county the right to the title of the Mother of American Methodism. History was fast making in those days. In 1764 the Stamp Act was passed, and a commissioner was appointed to distribute the detested paper in the province of Maryland. Court was sitting in Frederick Town, but there was no paper of the prescribed variety on hand. On the 23d of November, 1765, twelve free men of Frederick decreed and declared that Frederick Court could attend to its own affairs without any aid from his Majesty the King, and that, paper or no paper, its work should proceed. John Darnell, the clerk, demurred, refused to issue unstamped paper, was committed for contempt, submitted, and thus the first repudiation of the Stamp Act was accomplished. The names of the twelve justices who, without hesitation or fear, took this great step, were these: Joseph Smith, David Lyon, Charles Jones, Samuel Beall, Joseph Beall, Peter Bainbridge, Thomas Price, Andrew Hugh, William Blair, William Luckett, Thomas Dickson and Thomas Beatty.