Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 216, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 September 1919 — GOOD WORK IN CANAL ZONE [ARTICLE]

GOOD WORK IN CANAL ZONE

1 1 ■ HI II ■! —■!— " • _____ Archdeacon Carson Telia of Religious Activities Among Those Employed on the “Big Ditch." •> Few men perhaps have so intimate a knowledge of the spiri tual progress made in the canal zone as the Rev. Henry Roberts Carson, archdeacon *of the Protestant Episcopal church there. From those days when the canal was yet a great doubt until the present, Mr. Carson has been laboring among the employees of the canal that they might have comfort - of body and welfare of soul. White and black, the men there know him well and have y.mn tn i O ye him, for Archdeacon Carson was with them in the now almost forgotten days when fever raged upon the Isthmus and each noon struck men to the death. Those early days Archdeacon Carson recalled in the missions house of the Protestant Episcopal church at New York the other day before returning to the canal zone. “We .were few in number then and the work was more than enough for many,” he said. “The employees, most of them natives of the British West Indies, were housed in labor camps here and there, for the channel was not cut through from one end to the other; but activities were everywhere along Its path. “And in these camps we started churches and the church moved when the camp moved, for_when the work in that immediate vicinity was completed the camp went elsewhere. When the water w’as turned into the canal it submerged these places where we had held divine service.”

While the work stretches from one ocean to the other, with churches at a dozen places, some of the most unselfish labor is among lepers in the mission of the Holy Comfort on the west coast. There are to be* found some 80 patients, including about a dozen children, and not a week passes without services being held for them.