USA > Connecticut > The story of the Diocese of Connecticut : a new branch of the vine (Espiscopal Church) > Part 30
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Other well-known alumni were Jackson Kemper, missionary bishop in the West; Henry Washington Lee, first Bishop of Iowa; Edwin S. Lines, Bishop of Newark; General Joseph Wheeler of the Civil and Spanish-American Wars; J. Pierpont Morgan, financier; William Gwinn Mather, Cleveland iron manufacturer; DeLancey Nicoll, celebrated New York attorney; John Frederick Kensett, artist; and Ernest Flagg, architect. Among the twenty-nine hun- dred men who attended before 1916 were many others eminent in the Church, business, manufacturing, law, politics, and literature, with a considerable number from foreign countries.
The Academy attained its greatest prosperity under the long régime (1862-1892) of the Rev. Sanford J. Horton. He was an alum- nus of Trinity College and previously had conducted a boys' school in Windham. He introduced military training, greatly increased the enrollment, and added another building and a large playground.
After his resignation the principals never stayed long. The Academy did not secure adequate financial support to rival other flourishing preparatory schools, although there were repeated ef- forts to improve the administration and to arouse the interest of Church people. In the 1890's the Convention and Bishop Williams supported a long campaign for endowment and expansion, but with only modest success. In 1903 the Convention appointed a committee to lease the school to a corporation of alumni, called the "Cheshire School," with the option of purchasing the property.
The new administration spent liberally for repairs, improve- ments, and equipment to raise the school to the highest standard. Hope for a new era of great prosperity was not realized, because the school could not compete with many heavily endowed rivals. In 1921 the Convention empowered the trustees to dispose of the property, and the Academy was sold to the "Roxbury School." The Convention ratified the sale and the school ceased to be a diocesan institution. The trustees continued to control certain scholarships, which they award annually to sons of clergymen and laymen in the Diocese, and the Cheshire School now uses the buildings.
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SAINT MARGARET'S DIOCESAN SCHOOL
For ninety years the Diocese had no officially related sec- ondary school for girls. The Episcopal Academy admitted girls un- til 1836, and about one hundred (mostly from the neighborhood) attended. The Academy's prosperity in the 1870's suggested the probable success of a girls' school, and an earnest discussion in the Convention of 1874 set the project in motion. The next year a group of wealthy Churchmen and others in Waterbury secured the in- corporation of "Saint Margaret's School for Girls." They purchased the building of the "Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies," which had been erected about ten years before.
Saint Margaret's began as an official diocesan institution, with the Bishop as ex-officio president of the trustees, who were appointed by the Convention. Although trustees are not now re- quired to be Episcopalians, it is still the only secondary school officially related to the Diocese. The rector of St. John's parish in Waterbury is vice-president of the trustees.
Saint Margaret's was a gratifying success from its origin, and has always been a source of pride to the Diocese. It has been a first-class college-preparatory school, and by its scholarships has aided in educating the daughters of the clergy.
Bishop Brewster always regarded Saint Margaret's with special favor, and repeatedly appealed to his people to enlarge its endowment and scholarships. He lived to rejoice in the fulfillment of his hopes, and in June 1928 dedicated a handsome new Georgian residence building for the faculty and students. Within a few years the school began to outgrow its buildings, and in 1954 dedi- cated a costly edifice containing classrooms and an assembly hall. Contributions by trustees, the Alumnae Association, and interested Churchmen revealed the deep loyalty and affection which the school had implanted throughout the Diocese.
Saint Margaret's is now one of the largest and finest Church schools in the nation, with an enrollment of over three hundred, mostly day students, and a faculty of over thirty members. Its ideal is that of its founders, "to maintain high standards of aca- demic and character education, to develop the best qualities of Christian leadership, disciplined intelligence, and a strong sense of social obligation and responsibility."5 This standard was upheld by such early teachers as Professor Francis T. and Mrs. Russell,
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and Miss Mary R. Hillard, and has been continued by the recent headmistresses.
The primary, intermediate, and senior departments are de- voted mainly to preparation for college. Academic credit is given for church history, Bible study, and doctrine, taught by a resident faculty member and the staff of St. John's parish. Daily services are conducted in the chapel, and the boarding students attend St. John's Church on Sunday. The striking success of this school sug- gests what might have been the future of the Episcopal Academy, if the Diocese had given it more support.
OTHER SECONDARY SCHOOLS
The Academy and Saint Margaret's are only part of the di- ocesan contribution to secondary education. There have been many other similar schools conducted by Episcopalians, but without of- ficial diocesan association. In the early 1800's there were acade- mies at Sharon and Granby. In the 1820's the Rev. Reuben Sher- wood, rector of St. Paul's parish in Norwalk, founded a flourishing Episcopal Academy. In 1830 he became rector of the Hartford Academy, which was established by Episcopalians to prepare boys for Washington (Trinity) College. He conducted the school as a "Christian household" of fifty pupils, with daily devotions and church service on Sunday.
Long before Saint Margaret's opened, there were Episcopal private schools for girls. Mrs. Kineer's Young Ladies Seminary prospered in Hartford for some time after 1827, with the approval of Bishop Brownell and other prominent clergymen, and the as- sistance of some of the Washington (Trinity) College faculty. Many such schools sprang up in the middle years of the century. The Misses Draper had a successful and widely known Ladies Semi- nary in Hartford. The Misses Edwards, early supporters of Christ Church, conducted a similar School for Young Ladies in New Haven. The Rev. Charles W. Everest, poet and editor, for many years was the headmaster of the Rectory School for boys in Ham- den. These and other lesser known schools were well supported and nearly always full.
The Episcopal Church has a close, unofficial affiliation with about one hundred private schools in the nation, and more than ten per cent of these are in Connecticut. For girls, there are Rose-
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mary Hall in Greenwich, with its unusually beautiful Gothic chapel, and the Westover School in Middlebury. For boys there are Choate School in Wallingford, Kent (also girls) and South Kent Schools, Pomfret School, Rectory School, Salisbury School, Wooster School in Danbury, and Watkinson School in Hartford.
Although these schools are not officially Episcopalian, they are conducted by members of the Church and use the Prayer Book services, and many of their students come from the Diocese.
TRINITY COLLEGE
Repeatedly rebuffed in their efforts to secure a college char- ter, Churchmen became more determined than ever. In 1815-1816 they read with approval the Connecticut Herald's series of articles, "Right of Churchmen to a College." The Convention in 1816 in- structed a committee to petition the General Assembly to charter a college, to be "conducted upon broad principles of religious toleration."6
The current political campaign for religious toleration made the moment seem unfavorable and the project was postponed. For a short time it seemed that the Diocese would secure a school of higher learning without its own effort. In 1820 the General Con- vention decided to move the languishing General Theological Seminary from New York to New Haven. Bishop Brownell was fairly jubilant, and even moved to that city to teach in the semi- nary. But in 1822 the school returned to New York City to occupy its present site at Chelsea Square.
The Bishop already had revived the campaign for a college by calling a meeting of the clergy at his house a few days before Christmas, 1822. Without waiting for authority from the Conven- tion, they appointed a committee to circulate a petition, which was presented to the General Assembly in May, 1823. The legislators made up for lost time by granting a charter for "Washington Col- lege." The Governor signed it so quickly that the State scarcely could believe the news. The name became "Trinity College" in 1845.
The trustees lost no time in electing Bishop Brownell as president and in placing the college's financial affairs in the highly capable hands of Charles Sigourney of Hartford. (See Appendix I, under Thomas Church Brownell) They addressed an eloquent ap-
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peal to the Church of England and sent the Rev. Nathaniel Shel- don Wheaton across the ocean to secure funds and books. That persuasive divine visited cathedrals and universities and won many potent friends. Among them were Lord Kenyon, the Bishop of St. David's, and Doctor Christopher Wordsworth, Master of Trinity College in Cambridge. Although he found soliciting "tedious be- yond description," as he wrote to Sigourney, Wheaton enjoyed himself thoroughly, and returned to Hartford with books and about £700.
In the meantime, rivalry for the location sprang up among Hartford, New Haven, and Middletown. The trustees selected Hartford, where the news was greeted with fireworks and the boom of cannon. Middletown was belatedly compensated in 1854 by the location of the Berkeley Divinity School. The opening of classes was hailed by another kind of fireworks - a war of pamphlets, instigated by anonymous articles in the Connecticut Courant attacking the college as unnecessary and "sectarian." The rejoinder, a pamphlet supposedly written by Wheaton, was con- sidered by Episcopalians as the end of the argument.
The controversy did not discourage donors from raising an endowment of fifty thousand dollars within a year. The Church- man's Magazine threw its influence into the campaign and many Hartford people donated labor and materials. In 1825 the first buildings were ready on the present site of the State Capitol. The residence hall was designed by Solomon Willard, the architect of the Bunker Hill Monument. Samuel F. B. Morse, the noted painter and inventor of the telegraph, designed the chapel building, which contained also the library, museum, and lecture rooms. On Capitol Hill the college remained until 1878, when it sold the site to the State and acquired its present spacious campus between Summit and Broad Streets.
Classes began in September, 1824, in a house on Main Street, with only nine students. The college soon grew swiftly and in 1827 held its first commencement. It then had a faculty of seven, about seventy undergraduates, and a library of five thousand vol- umes. It had won public confidence, and a visiting committee of the General Assembly reported that there was "no literary insti- tution in New England, less liable to the imputation of a sectarian character."7
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Washington College was a beacon of liberalism in the American academic world, which had scarcely begun to emerge from strict classicism and sectarianism. There were no religious tests for teaching or admission, and students were free to worship where they liked. The courses naturally included Latin and Greek literature, mathematics, logic, and rhetoric. They also displayed the growing trend toward natural sciences by including chemistry, mineralogy, geology, agriculture, and botany, with a garden and a greenhouse. Discipline was spartan; the first faculty minutes in- structed the president to admonish two juniors for disorderly conduct - including rolling a log downstairs at night!
The clergy loyally supported the college and at one period gave a tenth of their small incomes to found scholarships for poor students. In 1845 the alumni organized a "House of Convocation" to promote loyalty, secure support, and further the ideals of Chris- tian scholarship. Having set the college upon a solid foundation, in 1832 Bishop Brownell resigned the presidency to Doctor Whea- ton, who could give it all his time. The college fulfilled the Bishop's dearest hope. By 1847 about one-fourth of the clergy in the Diocese and nearly one-tenth in the nation were alumni of Trinity. At that time the college had a steadily growing endow- ment, another residence hall for students, an enlarged library, and better equipment.
A surge of growth began with the removal to Summit Street, and around the turn of the century there were generally about two hundred students. Trinity's ideal was always to be an excellent college, without a preparatory department or professional schools. Steady growth marked the long régime of the beloved Rev. Rem- sen B. Ogilby, from 1923 to 1950, and has continued through the presidencies of G. Keith Funston and Albert C. Jacobs. There are now more than one thousand resident and day students. Since 1940 the college has erected a new gymnasium, a dormitory, a sci- ence building, and a new library which houses the Diocesan Ar- chives and the famous Watkinson Library with its many rare books and magazines.
Trinity's peculiar glory is the chapel, consecrated in 1932 to succeed Wheaton Memorial Chapel in the main building. It was given by William Gwinn Mather of Cleveland, of the class of 1877. It is a true college chapel and is considered to be the finest house
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of worship in Hartford, and one of the nation's best examples of Gothic architecture. A steady and increasing stream of visitors comes to hear the organ recitals and to admire the carved choir stalls, the cloister, the exquisite stained glass, and the soaring tower with a carillon. Above all, they come to worship where worship seems so natural.
Trinity College has no organic connection with the Diocese, but is affiliated with the Episcopal Church. The president and most of the trustees are Churchmen, and there is a resident Episcopal chaplain, assisted by clerical members of the faculty. The students are of all faiths but a considerable proportion are Episcopalians, including a goodly number intending to enter the priesthood. The Bishop visits the college on important occasions, such as confirmations, commencements, and dedications of build- ings. Trinity is host to many gatherings sponsored by the Church, including the annual Institute in Theology for college and univer- sity faculty members. The annual Religious Embassy, composed of clergymen and laymen of various religious faiths, discusses the relation of religion to the modern world. The students support a Brownell Club devoted to the cultivation of devotion and thought in the Episcopal Church.
COLLEGE CHAPLAINCIES
Trinity College always has provided its own religious ministry, while Episcopalian students in other colleges have depended upon occasional care by busy parish clergy. Yale students have enjoyed the hospitality of Trinity and Christ Church parishes. In 1869 campus Churchmen formed a Berkeley Association, named for the Irish bishop who generously patronized Yale in its early days.
In the early 1900's the Episcopal Church claimed about one-third of the Yale undergraduates and a considerable portion of the faculty. Bishop Brewster, a loyal alumnus, longed to give them a chaplain, and in 1922 obtained funds from the Nation-Wide Campaign. The first chaplain, George A. Trowbridge, began his ministry under the auspices of the Department of Religious Education.
This ministry, one of the most challenging and sensitive in the Diocese, has demanded the full energies of devoted men.
The Yale chaplaincy has become one of the most notable
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diocesan enterprises, secure in the respect of the campus, as "the Episcopal Church at Yale." The chaplain works with interested members of the faculty, and chaplains of other faiths, in conducting missions and considering peculiar campus religious problems. His office is a haven for students needing advice. His life is devoted to frequent Communion services, discussion and study groups, con- firmation classes, and entertaining students in his home. Wives of students and faculty members form an altar guild. A stream of candidates for the ministry and a steady rise of religious interest attest the success of this ministry. Its experience has suggested the general pattern of more recently established college chaplaincies.
One sprang from the amazing postwar expansion of the University of Connecticut at Storrs. Modest attendance at a monthly Communion inspired the first new Episcopal mission in Tolland County in over seventy years. The chaplaincy began in 1946, under the Rev. Harry W. Heermans, priest-in-charge of St. Paul's Church, Windham, who held services and office hours at the Storrs Community Chuch. In an astonishingly short time the work was in full swing, with guilds, classes, study groups, in- struction for lay-readers, and an enthusiastic Canterbury Club with faculty advisors. Mr. Heermans left the ministry firmly grounded for his successors, Frederic J. Eastman, Elward D. Hollman, and Eugene C. Dixon.
Bishop Gray's plea for a chapel inspired Margaret Fitch (Mrs. Frederick) Brewster of New Haven to donate one with full space for student and parish activities. When the building was consecrated by Bishop Gray, on December 3, 1955, the sealed cornerstone contained her letter to him, including these words: "The future of our state is in their [ the students'] hands and I am grateful for the privilege of donating this chapel for their use."3
The chapel is also an impressive departure from Con- necticut's traditional styles of church architecture - a "Modern" brick and tile adaptation of Gothic. Among its striking features are decorative steel truss work, skylights, a huge altar cross of stainless steel and mosaic, and a ring of bells in a perpendicular groove in the facade. The ministry also is unique in the Diocese, for the college chaplain is the pastor of St. Mark's mission for nearby Episcopalians. The mission is growing into a flourishing parish, in a region where the Episcopal Church never has been strong.
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Within the last twenty years student ministries have taken root in nearly all Connecticut colleges and universities. The one at the Connecticut College for Women in New London began in the early 1940's, with services by the Rev. Clinton R. Jones. The Church now has a deep interest in youth at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, the teachers' colleges (now state uni- versities) of Connecticut in New Britain, and elsewhere, Wesleyan University in Middletown, and the University of Bridgeport.
These ministries are bound together by the diocesan as- sociation of Canterbury Clubs, which cooperates closely with the Department of Youth and Laymen's Work, with its General Sec- retary as an advisor. The association is governed by students and holds spring and autumn week-end meetings at the Diocesan Con- ference Center to promote closer fellowship and college religion through study, prayer, discussion groups, lectures, and recreation. It sends delegates to the national Triennial Youth Convention. The Department of Youth and Laymen's Work places representatives on campuses, arranges faculty conferences, and aids the annual Conference in Theology at Trinity College, with loyal support from the Woman's Auxiliary chairman for college work. It also holds meetings of chaplains and student representatives, and co- operates with the national Commission on College Work.
The ministry to youth in the schools is one among many expressions of a new social spirit in the Church that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Social Gospel regarded every class in the community as an opportunity for the Church's redemptive mission. Youth is the best hope of converting society to the Christian way of life through converted individuals.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE SOCIAL GOSPEL
ORIGINS
PISCOPALIANS were among the earliest leaders of social benevolence in the American churches. A pioneer was Bishop William White of Pennsylvania, who led numerous charit- able societies. His example was followed by such eminent priests as Joseph J. G. Bend of Baltimore, E. M. P. Wells of Boston, and the Evangelical leader, James Milnor of New York. Some Epis- copalians stood aloof from the Social Gospel, more from indifference than from hostility. High Churchmen often feared to compromise the Church's dignity by participation in "worldly" causes.
Many Connecticut Churchmen shared that sentiment and yet approved the general paternal attitude toward the earliest factory laborers, who were largely children. They sanctioned Sunday schools for them and laws requiring employers to educate them and send them to church. The relationship was considered to be that of the responsible master to his servant.
Opposition to social reform slowly disappeared after 1825, when Connecticut was swept by a laboring-class reform crusade. The factory village was no longer a child's world. Industry was creating a large class of adult wage-earners and independent mechanics. They joined the farmers in demanding equal economic opportunity, free education, universal suffrage, and a shorter work- ing day. This "Workey" agitation was frequently criticized as ir- religious, but appeals to religious sanction of reform appeared in labor newspapers, like the Working Man's Advocate of New York, which was read and quoted in Connecticut.
The wage-earners' and farmers' democratic movement favored Christianity as a social gospel and scorned state churches and religious privilege. Labor associations and newspapers fought legislative appropriations or special favors to churches, and judicial inquests respecting religious opinions. They advocated freedom
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of conscience, and time for spiritual welfare, and were supported by some liberal ministers and religious periodicals. The Religious Inquirer of Hartford deplored the snobbish depreciation of manual labor and of the working classes, and the New Haven Examiner, and Watch Tower of Freedom excoriated "heartless slave drivers" of child factory labor.1
Churches opened their parish rooms to working people's meetings for higher wages, to celebrate the Fourth of July, or to discuss economic and political questions. Some clergymen lectured to promote workingmen's welfare and education. Mechanic society libraries included religious books, and workingmen's newspapers reprinted essays in religious magazines on social and educational reform.
A few prominent Episcopalians openly sympathized with the "Workey" movement. Among them were John M. Niles, editor of the liberal Hartford Times, and Gideon Welles of Glastonbury. An influential early labor leader was the shoemaker, Daniel C. Augur of New Haven. He was a member of Trinity Church there and later for many years was a vestryman of St. James's Church, Westville.
The labor movement achieved most of its social and political reforms, and after 1850 seemed less important than the tragic controversy over slavery and Southern secession. The Episcopal Church was officially neutral, fearing to be rent by the strife which had split other churches and was threatening to divide the nation. Many Churchmen freely granted that slavery was an evil, but hesitated to condemn it as a sin. They disliked extreme and abusive Abolitionist propaganda, which depicted all slave-owners as sadistic Simon Legrees.
While most Episcopalians endorsed the Church's official neutrality, some eminent clergymen and laymen publicly con- demned or defended slavery. The most noted Northern defenders were High Churchmen, who dreaded disunion. In 1851 the Rev. Nathaniel Sheldon Wheaton of Hartford published a sermon urging compliance with the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Numerous Connecticut Churchmen sought a solution of the problem by colonizing free Negroes in Africa.
More important than abolitionism or colonization was the Free Soil movement, opposed to the extension of slavery. It in-
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spired the organization of the Republican Party, which attracted three of Connecticut's outstanding Episcopalian politicians - Gideon Welles, James Dixon, and William T. Minor. They were no friends of slavery and were happy to see it abolished. But above all, they wanted to preserve unity in the nation and the Church. The attitude of most Episcopalians was voiced by the Calendar of Hartford, in January 1861. Editorials and letters deplored sec- tionalism and pleaded for unity in the Church, even if the South should secede. This attitude made impossible the permanence of the "Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America," and by 1868 the brief schism had been healed.
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