Chapel, on the Oswald Tilghman map that hangs in the Patriot's well, is the old Fourth Election District in the county's northeast. Cordova is the name the place wears now. Joseph Mosley is the life that district can carry.

He was born November 16, 1731, in Lincolnshire, entered the Society of Jesus in 1748, and came to Maryland in 1758. He worked first in Charles and St. Mary's, then in 1764 was sent to St. Francis Xavier — Old Bohemia — in Cecil County, whose territory then ran the Eastern Shore, Delaware, and a piece of Pennsylvania. On March 18, 1765, he bought a farm near the head of the Wye and opened the Tuckahoe mission. The marker at Maryland 404 and Church Lane still uses that date.

The law of the province did not allow a public Mass house. It did allow a chapel in a dwelling. Mosley farmed the place, rode a circuit that reached sixty miles, and kept a journal that remains one of the few named records of Eastern Shore Acadian families in the 1760s. Fellow Jesuits sent him cash and transferred enslaved people to support the new residence, the same plantation logic that underwrote Old Bohemia. By the mid-1780s his congregation numbered some five or six hundred.

The building is the scene that remains.

After nearly twenty years of farm income and help from the parent house, he put up, in 1782, a brick chapel and dwelling in one pile: rooms to live in over the worship floor. From the road it could pass as a farmhouse. Inside, the first floor was a church. He wrote his sister that he had begun it trusting Providence and finished it without a subscription from the gentlemen or the congregation. Sunday Mass has been said in that pile, on that farm, ever since. He died June 3, 1787, and was buried under the chapel. Two other priests lie with him.

The house was enlarged in 1848. In 1903 a cloverleaf apse was added. The Maryland Historical Trust still reads the dark-brick central bays as the 1782 work. The claim that St. Joseph's is the oldest Catholic church on the Eastern Shore needs a shorter stride. What can be said without the hedge is that this building, on this farm, has not gone out of use.

The joust on the first Wednesday of August, held in the yard since 1868 except in wartime, is a later parish custom. It is not his. The church stands at 13209 Church Lane. The marker stands at the highway.

Sources: Maryland Historical Trust inventory T-73; HMDB marker, Maryland Historical Society, 1966; Georgetown University notes on the Eastern Shore Jesuit houses; Mosley's letters as cited in parish histories. The Trust says the church is regarded by some as the earliest Catholic church still extant on the Shore, and notes that the Tubman Chapel in Dorchester, a small frame building, may be earlier.