EV. ADAM CLOUD became a preacher among the Methodists in 1781. He labored in Virginia. He was one of the twelve received that year--1781--the year in which Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in Virginia. The Rev. Devereux Jarratt did much service for the Methodists in administering the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, and in giving advice at the conferences. He was one of the clergy of the English church, who had not fled from the country at the breaking out of the war between the colonies and the mother country.

      At the Methodist Conference at which was passed the decree known as the "Methodistical Bull" by which thirteen preachers excommunicated twenty-seven Virginia, preachers, the following was also passed: "Order the said trustees to meet every half year and keep a register of their proceedings, and if there are any vacancies, choose new trustees for better security of the [39] houses, let all the deeds be drawn in substance after that in the printed minutes." By these minutes all the preaching houses were conveyed to Mr. Wesley. And in the time of the war all British property was confiscated and became public property. The preachers became alarmed and to prevent the Americans from seizing their houses, destroyed all the deeds. Adam Cloud was present when several deeds were destroyed.

      He was present at the Christmas Conference in Baltimore in 1784, at which the Methodist Episcopal Church was organized with its discipline substantially as it has remained from that time. He, as it is stated, "desisted from traveling" in 1788, and when Mr. O'Kelly withdrew from the Methodists in 1792, he joined him and became a minister in the Christian Church. Bangs, in his History of the Methodist Church, says he was expelled, but he is recorded by Guirey differently. Why Bangs should thus speak of him, we do not understand. The record is that which is usual when a minister located, that he "desisted from traveling." Was it that he was zealous in the cause of the new Church?

[LCM 39-40]