The American Lutheran churches undertook to aid their co-religionists, and in 1850 the Pittsburg Synod and the Joint Synod of Ohio each sent one of its ministers into the Northwest, but the epidemic of cholera caused them to hurry back to their former homes.[272] The real support of some of the immigrant Lutheran missionaries came from the American Home Missionary Society (Congregational). One of the men thus assisted was Paul Anderson (Norland) who came from Norway in 1843, and received a part of his education in the new Congregational college at Beloit. He was chosen pastor of the first Norwegian Lutheran Church in Chicago in 1848, and journeyed to Albany, New York, to be ordained by a Lutheran minister, but he nevertheless served under a commission from the Congregational Society, and made reports to it for several years.[273] [272] _The North_, Aug. 30, 1893, quoting from _The Workman_. [273] Jensson, _American Lutheran Biographies_, 25 ff; _The Home Missionary_, XXII, 263, 264; XXIII, 119. In Anderson's report for 1850 is an account of a visit to Dane County, Wisconsin, where 'one of the Formalists,' after five years of labor had failed to bring much enlightenment. "There are some four thousand or more Norwegians in one settlement, about three-quarters of whom are members of this man's church, and the rest are sheep without a shepherd. They had had preaching there for the last five years, but such gross immorality I had never witnessed before.... We have no reasonable ground to hope that a single individual of those three thousand souls is converted to God; for all are intemperate and profane.... Of all I saw (and I saw a great many) two out of three were intoxicated, or had been drinking so that it was offensive to come within the sphere poisoned by their breath; and of every two I heard talking together one or both profaned their Maker."