Francis Makemie

Francis Makemie (1658–1708) was an Irish clergyman, considered to be the founder of Presbyterianism in United States of America.

Makemie was born into the Ulster-Scots community in Ramelton, County Donegal, part of the Province of Ulster in the north of Ireland. He attended Glasgow University, where he underwent a religious conversion. He went on to become a clergyman and be ordained by the Presbytery of Laggan, in West Ulster, in 1681.

Ten years after emigrating to America in 1682, as discussed below, Makemie married Naomi Anderson, the daughter of a successful Maryland businessman and landowner. Francis and Naomi had two daughters, Anne and Elizabeth.

At the call of Colonel William Stevens, an Episcopalian from Rehobeth, Maryland, Rev. Makemie was sent as a missionary to America, arriving in Maryland in 1683. Makemie initially preached in Somerset County, Maryland and established the Rehobeth Presbyterian Church the oldest Presbyterian Church in America, near the Coventry Parish Church which Col. Stevens attended. The ruins of Coventry Parish Church still stand nearby.

Makemie also supported himself as a merchant and traveled among other Scots-Irish communities, many of which were isolated, as well as suspicious of each other. In the eastern part of Somerset County (that split to become Worcester County, Maryland in 1742 and erected All Hallows Episcopal Church about a decade later), Makemie founded the first Presbyterian community in the Town of Snow Hill, which had been founded in 1686 and named for a London neighborhood. Snow Hill was to be the center of the Presbytery of Snow Hill, which received a charter from Maryland's General Assembly, but was never activated.

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