Fr.
Peter Anderson, Sacramento's First Catholic Priest
Fr. Peter Augustine Anderson, O.P., was the first American priest to come into California (1850) to live here. He was born, a Presbyterian, in Elizabethtown, New Jersey in 1812, the year of the war between United States and Britain. His father died when he was 12 years old and the family moved to Somerset, Ohio, where they all became Catholic because of the influence of the Dominicans nearby.
At 17, Anderson entered the Dominican Religious order. After some years he was ordained a priest and sent off to the missions, which at that time meant Ohio and both sides of the Mississippi river, all the way down to New Orleans and back. Included in his missionary journey was a trip to Montreal, Canada to aid the many Irish victims of the Famine. In 1850, his Provincial, a priest named Joseph Alemany, OP, sent him to California. He came by way of the Isthmus of Panama and arrived in San Francisco in 1850, which was just recovering from a fire. The city and its energy in rebuilding excited him. He literally threw himself into his work as a missionary.
One of his first missions was the growing town of Sacramento. With great enthusiasm, he sailed up the river and gathered around him a group of men who wanted to build a church at 7th and K streets. The plans were made, the property deeded over. For some months, Anderson went back and forth between San Francisco and Sacramento, Sacramento and Yuba City and Marysville. He was all over!
When the cholera epidemic broke out, Anderson went into the tents and hospitals to help the sick. He paid little or no attention to his own health, becoming so fatigued that he was open to the sickness himself. He died in November 1850. When many of the inhabitants were fleeing the cholera and Sacramento, Anderson remained. He was spoken of as a martyr of charity after his death by the men who knew him best, doctors. He was buried under the new church being built at 7th and K streets. A windstorm blew it down. His body was later removed and is now in the cemetery of the Dominican order, at Benicia, California.
Copyright © Wm. Breault, SJ 1997
