December 1, 1879

Swiss-German Catholic priest and missionary Eugene Weibel, who had arrived at St. Benedict’s in Logan County in February 1879 after immigrating to the United States and living in Indiana, stepped off the train in Pocahontas (Randolph County) to begin almost thirty years of ministry in northeast Arkansas. Two months before, Arkansas’s Catholic bishop Edward M. Fitzgerald had asked him to undertake this mission. He was now no longer a monk in the Benedictine Order, as he had been at his parish church in Eschenbach, Canton Lucerne, Switzerland, but a priest serving the Catholic Diocese of Little Rock.