This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Father John Alleman could well have been a 19th century Illinois Methodist circuit rider except for two things: he was not a Methodist, and he had no horse.
What he did have in full measure was the circuit rider's restless and lonely vision, approaching exile, that sent him wandering from one Mississippi Valley settlement to another, planting churches and parishes, yet unable to put down roots himself.
Reverend Alleman arrived in the Rock Island area in 1851, already a wanderer. He and his parents had immigrated to Kentucky from Alsace-Lorraine. In Kentucky, he entered St. Rose Priory and, in 1834, became a Dominican missionary priest. As he wandered from Ohio to Chicago to Iowa, Father Alleman developed a reputation for insisting that the congregations he founded build solid church buildings rather than make-do quarters. His single-mindedness made him difficult to live with. "Alleman is crazy at times," wrote a fellow priest from Ohio.
And so, his wanderings brought him to Rock Island in 1851, where he set about building the first Catholic church in Rock Island County. St. James, later St. Mary's, was completed in 1852. By then, Father Alleman had already resumed his wanderings. He was a large man, in robust health, and walked from place to place rather than go on horseback. Wherever he went, he wore a black cassock and a broad-brimmed hat and carried a pair of saddle bags over his arm filled with the trappings needed to construct a crude altar and hold mass.
On his jaunts, Father Alleman boarded in Catholic homes and held masses there. And he planted churches along the valley: in Moline, Hampton, Owl Grove, Keithsburg, and Warsaw. Each was planted well, with substantial church buildings.
And so, this spiritual Jonny Appleseed planted churches and wandered, eventually to the St. Louis area where he died in 1865. His name is on a Catholic high school in Rock Island, on a variety of rose, and in local histories as one of our folk heroes.
Father Alleman took his inspiration from another restless witness of the church. "I will plant," he wrote, paraphrasing St. Paul, “let others water, and let God give the increase.”
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
