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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 03332 2261
GC 974. 402 G798ch Chapman, Gerard, 1913- St. James' Parish, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 1762-1962
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THE FOUNDER OF THE PARISH
Thomas Davies (1736-66), Priest of the Church of England in the service of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, who organized the Great Barrington Parish on September 21. 1762.
ST. JAMES' PARISH Great Barrington, Massachusetts 1762-1962
by GERARD CHAPMAN
Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them. St. Matthew 7:20
Published by The Protestant Episcopal Society of Great Barrington 1962
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Allen County Public Library 900 Webster Street PO Box 2270 Fort Wayne, IN 46801-2270
COPYRIGHT 1962 BY GERARD CHAPMAN
PRINTED AND BOUND IN THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE REPORTER PRESS NORTH CONWAY, NEW HAMPSHIRE
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LIBRARY William & Mary College
This book is dedicated to RICHARD MORTIMER-MADDOX Rector of St. James' Parish 1944-1960 who prepared my wife for confirmation, baptised all four of our children, and prepared two of them for confirmation.
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FOREWORD
At intervals over the past few years, with the two-hundredth anniversary of St. James' Parish approaching, I had suggested mildly that someone - and certainly not I - should prepare a parochial his- tory in commemoration of that event. On the evening of January 7, 1960, when the subject again was under discussion, Mr. Robert K. Wheeler told me that if I would compile such a history, he would sec that it was published. That, in effect, was an admonition to "put up or shut up." Shortly thereafter, he brought me a tin box filled with documents and the quest was on. When I subsequently left Great Barrington for employment elsewhere, he entrusted to me all the old parish records.
So here is the result, for better or for worse. Your present Rector, the Rev. Pierce Middleton, Ph.D., has written several books and been professionally engaged in historical research. He could, of course, have done a far better job. But I was on the scene and he was not and so the task fell to me.
However, since I am utterly unqualified to discuss theology and ecclesiastical matters, he has added, where appropriate, discus- sions of trends and changes in religious thought and practices over the two centuries of St. James' existence. I am appreciative of this and of the editing he has performed on the manuscript. And it was he who selected the photographs and drawings which illustrate the book.
I think I may safely claim to speak for the Parish in saying that all of us are grateful to Mr. Wheeler, for forty-five years an officer of St. James' Parish, for underwriting the publication of this volume.
GERARD CHAPMAN
Port Huron, Michigan June 19, 1961
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
1 IN THE BEGINNING 1
2 THE REVOLUTIONARY YEARS . 9
3 FINANCIAL CRISIS 21
4 GROWTH: TWO NEW CHURCHES 25
5 FURTHER GROWTH: THE THIRD CHURCH 31
6 CIVIL WAR AND HIGH CHURCH . 35
1- TURN OF THE CENTURY 41
S BEAUTIFICATION AND RETROSPECTION 47
9 TRINITY CHURCH, VAN DEUSENVILLE . 59
10 SHORT SUBJECTS 65
. 11 GIFTS AND MEMORIALS 72
.. . ILLUSTRATIONS
THE FOUNDER OF THE PARISH Frontispiece
THE FIRST CHURCH OF THE PARISH, 1764-1833 xvi
THE WASHINGTON CENOTAPH, 1800 24
A VIEW OF THE PARISH HOUSE AND ST. JAMES' CHURCH FROM ACROSS ST. JAMES' PLACE . 40
ST. JAMES' CHURCH AND RECTORY 56
THE ALTAR AT ST. JAMES' CHURCH . 72
A CHILD IS RECEIVED INTO THE CONGREGATION OF CHRIST'S FLOCK .
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SUNDAY MORNING AT ST. JAMES' CHURCH .
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The photograph of the Altar (page 72) was taken by Lucien Aigner. All the other photographs were done by John S. Watson. The drawing of the artist's conception of the first church was done by Elisabeth Lawton Ridout.
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PREFACE
By the Rector of St. James' Parish
I
THE PRAYER BOOK COMES TO NEW ENGLAND
D NE would suppose that the Church of England would be dominant wherever the British flag flew and English settlers abounded. This was not the case, however, in the thirteen colonies that became the United States of America. The Anglican Church got here first - at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 - and remained strong in Virginia and to a lesser extent in Mary- land until the Revolution. But it never succeeded in obtaining more than a foothold in the North, and especially in New England.
There were several reasons for this. The New England colonies were settled largely by Puritan non-conformists who were opposed to bishops and their claim to Apostolic authority and who refused to worship accord- ing to the liturgy of the Anglican Church as set forth in the Book of Com- mon Prayer. Another reason why the Church of England was so slow to gain ground in the New World was that late in the seventeenth century it entered a period of declining vitality, which was accentuated by the temper of eighteenth-century Rationalism. King William III and the first two Georges, moreover, were unsympathetic to Anglican principles and gen- erally appointed bishops who lacked zeal for pressing the distinctive claims of the Church either at home or in the colonies.
The British Government in the eighteenth century was primarily concerned with trade rather than with religion and exhibited little inclina- tion (until shortly before the Revolution) to meddle in American internal affairs. Hence the Anglican Church in the colonies lacked positive and forceful support from the London imperial authorities. A good example of this is the Government's neglect to accede to the various requests for co- lonial bishops. There was, to be sure, the problem of finding a means of financial support for them. But political expediency played the greater role in the Government's refusal to act. The Whig Party which virtually con- trolled Parliament from 1714 until 1763 leaned for support upon the mer- cantile interests of London and other British seaports where the English dissenters were concentrated. In America the dissenting majority opposed bishops in principle, feared their coercive power, and suspected that the proposal to introduce then into America was another device for fastening imperial authority upon the colonists.
For these reasons the English Church was hampered in its growth in English America and was denied the advantage that the Churches of France and Spain enjoyed in French and Spanish America. Even so, An- glicanism got a foothold in the very heart of Puritan New England, and the establishment of St. James' Parish, Great Barrington, is a part of this his- toric endeavor.
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Complaints reached King Charles II upon his restoration to the throne in 1660 that Massachusetts had enacted laws making it a penal offence to use the Prayer Book, forbidding the observance of Christmas, reserving to civil magistrates the right of performing the marriage ceremony, and restricting the vote to members of the Congregational Church. The king wrote to the General Court of the colony in 1662, "Since the principal end and foundation of the charter was and is, that freedom [i.e. liberty of conscience] ... We do hereby charge and require you, that that freedom and liberty be duely admitted and allowed, so that such as desire to use the Booke of Common Prayer, and perform their devotions in that manner, as is established here, be not denyed the exercise thereof."
The General Court, however, did nothing to improve matters, and when a Royal Commission arrived in Boston in 1664 to investigate the state of affairs in the colony, their chaplain, though he used the Prayer Book, was arbitrarily forbidden to wear a surplice. The Commissioners reported that it was "scandalous, that any person should be debarred the exercise of his religion according to the laws and customs of England, by those who were indulged with the liberty of being of what profession or religion they pleased." They also reported that the Congregationalists "will not admitt any one who is not a member of their church to the Communion, nor their Children to baptisme .... Those whom they will not admit to the Com- munion they compell to come to their sermons, by forcing 5 s [hillings ] from them for every neglect, yet these men thought their own paying of 12d [12 pence or 1 shilling] for not coming to prayers in England was an insupportable tyranny, and they yet constantly pray for their persecuted brethren in England."
The king was much displeased, but the fall of the Earl of Claren- don's Government at that time prevented any remedial action. In 1676, however, Charles II sent another investigator, Edward Randolph, and his report revealed such a state of disobedience to the king's commands, in- fringement of royal prerogatives, and suppression of the rights of English subjects, that the king began legal proceedings to terminate the charter of the colony, and this was done in 1684. At that time there was not a single parish of the Church of England in all five of the colonies that made up New England. Under the first royal governor, Sir Edmund Andros, this was soon to change.
In 1686 an English priest, Robert Ratcliffe, arrived in Boston com- missioned by the Bishop of London (in whose jurisdiction the English co- lonies were considered to lie) to serve in New England, and he brought with him Prayer Books, books of Canon Law and homilies (sermons), and Articles of Religion which were sent to New England by the Privy Council of Charles II. Ratcliffe asked for the use of one of the three Meeting Houses in Boston, but was refused. Instead, he held services according to the Prayer Book in one end of the Town Hall. As these facilities were inadequate, money was raised to build King's Chapel. The Puritan leaders, however, were determined to do nothing to help this Anglican intrusion into their territory. When Judge Samuel Sewall was asked to sell the site they wanted for the Church, he stoutly refused, "because I would not set up that which the People of New England came over to avoid," and reasserted the Puritan objection to certain Anglican customs such as the use of the cross in baptism and the observance of Holy Days.
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A burial according to the Prayer Book in 1689 was prevented by a riot and the newly-built King's Chapel daubed with mud. In addition to irresponsible threats of future destruction, the worship of the Chapel was condemned as wicked. The great Increase Mather published a book en- titled The Unlawfulness of Common Prayer Worship, in which he declared the liturgy of the Church of England to be little short of idolatrous and likened the corporate nature of it to "broken Responds and shreds of Prayer which the Priests and People toss between them like Tennis Balls." Edward Randolph subsequently wrote home to England that this book succeeded in making "all of us of the Church obnoxious to the Common People who account us Papists & treat us acordingly."
As King's Chapel continued its steady round of services, it became the target also of the redoubtable Cotton Mather, who in an election ser- mon in 1690 declared: "Let all mankind know, That we came into the wilderness, because we would worship God without Episcopacy, that Com- mon Prayer, and those unwarrantable Ceremonies, which the land of our Father's Sepulchres, has been defiled with . .. Let us not so much as Touch the unclean Thing."
The new Royal Charter of Massachusetts of 1691 provided liberty of conscience to all Christians - except Papists, who were still regarded as potential Quislings - and King William III personally gave an annuity of £ 100 and a valuable library to King's Chapel, Boston. Despite these legal guarantees and signs of royal favor, however, it was many years before the handful of Anglicans in New England succeeded in enjoying their charter rights. At the close of the seventeenth century, King's Chapel, with two priests, 120 communicants, and 600 baptised members, was the only Church of England parish in New England. But the fortunes of Anglicanism in this portion of God's vineyard were destined to improve in the course of the following century. This was partly because the Age of Reason produced a climate of opinion more favorable to toleration, and partly because of the heroic endeavors of a missionary society that was chartered by William III on June 16, 1701, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (later commonly known as the "S.P.C.," the "Venerable Society," and the "Propagation Society.") This claims our attention because the S.P.G. had so much to do with the founding of the Great Barrington parish and nurturing it in its early years.
The founder of the S.P.G. was Thomas Bray, a native of Shrop- shire, educated at All Souls', Oxford, and a priest of the Church of England. In 1696 he received appointment as the Bishop of London's Commissary for Maryland. Although he spent little time in America, this post led him to appreciate the hardship of life in the New World and the difficulties of recruiting English priests for colonial service. At first he attacked the prob- lem of the lack of books and libraries in America and assiduously gathered money and books to send overseas. By 1698 Bray had raised nearly £ 2,500 which he spent on libraries sent not only to each parish in Maryland, but also to places as widely separated as Charlestown, S. C., Barbados, Cape Coast Castle (South Africa), and Bengal. In 1699 he began the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge with its chief object to continue the work that Bray had begun. And the S.P.C.K., as it is familiarly known, even after more than 250 years is still the most important and effective agency
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of the Anglican Church in the realm of publishing and distributing books. Next Bray turned his attention to the problem of obtaining English priests for service in the New World. Being persuaded that the chief ob- stacle was inadequate financial support, he established the S.P.G. with the object of providing the needed assistance. Founded in 1701 (and still in existence) the S.P.G. took hold immediately. By 1741 it had built nearly 100 churches and sent abroad over 10,000 Prayer Books and Bibles, and over 100,000 pious tracts. In 1714 it sent some theological books to Yale College. In 1733 it was instrumental in persuading George Berkeley (then Dean of Derry in Ireland) to give a thousand-volume library to Yale. Har- vard, too, was the recipient of several gifts from the S.P.G. in 1748 and again in 1764 following the destruction of Harvard Hall together with the College Library by fire. Even more important was its extraordinary success in procuring missionary priests for the colonies. Between 1701 and the out- break of the American Revolution, the S.P.G. sent to America and provided support for no fewer than 353 Anglican priests. Included among them were Solomon Palmer, who was the first priest to hold services and administer sacraments according to the Prayer Book in what is now Great Barrington; Thomas Davies, the priest who organized what is now St. James' Parish in 1762; Ebenezer Punderson, Roger Viets, and Richard Mansfield who min- istered here occasionally in the years 1762-69; and Gideon Bostwick, who was the first rector of this parish.
In 1702 the S.P.G. sent two priests, George Keith and Patrick Gor- don, to America to ascertain the state of the Church in the colonies. Gordon died soon afterwards and his place was taken by John Talbot, the chaplain of the ship in which they came. While in Massachusetts they visited a num- ber of towns, and Keith reported to the S.P.G. that everywhere they went they found that the people were "generally well affected" and "did general- ly join with us decently in the Liturgy, and Publick Prayer, and Administra- tion of the Holy Sacraments, after the Usage of the Church of England." Many people earnestly desired them to request the Society to send priests to them. Many others "who had been wholly strangers to the Way of the Church of England" were so favorably impressed by its liturgy that they "declared their great Satisfaction and Esteem they had [for it] far above whatever they could observe [ in] other ways of worship known to them." As a result, the S.P.G. immediately began to send missionary priests to Massachusetts, and before long there were Anglican parishes in Braintree and Marblehead as well as Boston, and also several in Rhode Island and Connecticut.
The steady growth of the Church of England excited considerable alarm among the Congregationalists who found "that some of the ceremonies were camels too big for them . . . to swallow," but their opposition was ineffectual. In view of the liberty of worship guaranteed by the Royal Char- ter of 1691, the most they could do was to hinder as long as possible the struggle by the Anglicans to obtain exemption from paying taxes to support the established Congregational Church. The royal governors issued order after order to prevent such taxation, but local officials usually ignored them and hence the Anglican parishes were put to the expense and delay of carrying their cases through the courts. A test case in 1733 which went through three colonial courts with the right of appeal denied was taken
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before the King-in-Council whereupon the lower court decisions were re- versed. Thereafter the Massachusetts General Court yielded and granted tax relief to Anglicans. A colonial act of 1735 exempted all Anglicans living within five miles of a Church of England from paying taxes to support a Congregational minister. With this obstacle out of the way, the Church entered a period of steady growth. Between 1722 and 1735 the number of Anglican parishes in Massachusetts grew from four to nine. During the years 1736 to 1768, the number increased from nine to nineteen (including Great Barrington). In 1768 there were twelve Anglican priests settled in the co- lony, and no fewer than eight of them were American-born. The Church of England had not only come to Massachusetts, it had become domesti- cated here.
The Church made its appearance in Connecticut even later than in Massachusetts, but for a variety of reasons made a more spectacular ad- vance there. George Keith, reporting to the S.P.G. in 1702, said that Con- necticut had 33 towns and a population of 30,000 all of whom were Dis- senters. What he meant was that there were no Anglican churches. But it appears that there were in that colony many who were favorably disposed to the Prayer Book. In 1708 the colonial Assembly granted the benefits of the English Toleration Act of 1689 to certain people, provided they would continue to pay tithes to the Congregational Church. The year before, in 1707, an Anglican Church was begun at Stratford, but it failed to secure a settled priest until 1723, when Samuel Johnson, one of the "Yale Converts," became its first rector. The event which rocked New England Puritanism took place the previous year.
Timothy Cutler, a Congregational minister and president of Yale College, and Daniel Brown, the only other member of the faculty, together with several nearby ministers, including Samuel Johnson and James Wet- more, after having studied the Prayer Book and read Anglican works of divinity, announced to the trustees of the College on Thursday, September 13, 1722, that "some of us doubt the validity, and the rest of us are more fully persuaded of the invalidity of the Presbyterian [i.e. Congregational] ordination, in opposition to the Episcopal," and expressed their intention of going to England in quest of Anglican Holy Orders. As Yale College had been founded as a citadel of Puritan orthodoxy because Harvard was thought to be too liberal, this incident was a bolt out of the blue. On re- ceipt of the news in Boston a fast was held in Old North Meeting House, and after Cotton Mather preached a sermon, his father, Increase, bewailed "the Connecticut Apostacie."
On their return from England in priest's orders, Timothy Cutler became Rector of Christ Church, Boston and Samuel Johnson, Rector of Christ Church, Stratford, Connecticut, where he remained for many years until, in 1754, he became President of King's College (now Columbia Uni- versity) in New York. In the years that Johnson was at Stratford, Christ Church Parish was the vital center of Anglican influence in Connecticut and western Massachusetts. Of special interest to our story was the hand- some new church built there in 1742 which served as the model for the first church of the Great Barrington Parish, built in 1764 and also called Christ Church.
The double tithe on Anglicans in Connecticut - that is, the neces-
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sity of their having to support the Congregational minister as well as their own priest - proved to be a hindrance to the growth of the Church. But a petition in 1727 resulted in the Assembly granting tax relief to Anglicans. Thereafter the Church of England made remarkable strides in Connecticut. By 1742 there were fourteen Anglican parishes and seven priests. By the beginning of the Revolution the number had grown to forty churches and twenty priests. The strength of the Church of England in Connecticut and the fact that Berkshire County, Massachusetts enjoyed an easier access to the sea down the Housatonic Valley rather than across the Berkshire Barrier to Boston, help to explain why the early priests of St. James' Parish came from Connecticut and why Great Barrington found it more convenient to belong to the Diocese of Connecticut than to that of Massachusetts until after the beginning of the nineteenth century.
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II
COLONIAL ANGLICANS AT WORSHIP
B Y the middle of the eighteenth century there was little difference in the external appearance of an Anglican Church and a Puritan Meeting House in New England. But a striking difference was apparent immediately as one entered the door. The Puritan Meeting House was primarily an audi- torium for preaching in which the pulpit was the center of attraction, where- as the Anglican Church was designed for liturgical worship and for the administration of sacraments as well as for the reading and preaching of the Word. In Anglican usage a church was thought of as consisting of two quite distinct sections, the chancel and the nave -- and this was so whether or not there was a visible division, such as a chancel screen, between them. The chancel, which symbolized paradise, was the portion of the sacred edifice east of the screen in which the Holy Eucharist was celebrated and the risen Lord sacramentally received. The nave, on the other hand, sym- bolized the world: in it were the rank and file of the people, and there the Word was read and preached, children were catechized, daily prayers re- cited, and Holy Baptism administered.
In the larger English churches which retained their solid medieval rood screens separating chancel and nave, it was not uncommon for the Eucharist to be celebrated at the high altar in the chancel at the same time a service or catechism was being held in the nave. In the simple little churches of colonial America this was impossible, but the Anglicans here retained their rigid concept of the two separate compartments into which the church was divided. Following English practice, many seventeenth- century and some early eighteenth-century American churches were pro- vided with simple, chancel screens, solid for three feet or so, with slender turned ballisters above, supporting an ornate cornice. These screens declined in popularity after 1700, but even when they were omitted, the liturgical distinction between chancel and nave was preserved, and often architectural recognition was given to it by the use of a six-inch step in the aisle where the rood screen would have been.
The pulpit and reading desk, unlike modern practice which general- ly places them on opposite sides of the aisle, were almost always placed to- gether in colonial days. Not only were they combined into a single unit - known as a "two-decker" - but an additional desk at a lower level was occasionally added for the Parish Clerk (or Lay Reader as we should call him) who led the congregational responses in the liturgy. Hence, the sol- called "three-decker" emerged and gradually replaced its less pretentious antecedent. The location of the pulpit was generally on one side of the nave - often against the north or south wall. So rigid was the Anglican concept of the division between chancel and nave, however, that two or three-deckers were sometimes placed in the central aisle directly in front of the altar, as for example, in Trinity Church, Newport, Rhode Island
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(built in 1725). This showed no disrespect to the altar, because the altar was held to be in a separate part of the church, not to be confused with the nave. In a small church, too, the central aisle was often the only place where the large three-decker could be put without blocking the view of the altar from the nave pews. This was especially true of churches with side as well as a rear gallery. This location of the pulpit was an innovation after the restoration of Charles II when Sir Christopher Wren was trying to modify traditional designs in order to produce a church in which a large number of people could see and hear and participate in the liturgy of the Prayer Book. These novel ideas made little headway against English con- servatism until late in the following century when the Evangelical Move- ment placed unprecedented emphasis upon preaching. Quite unknown in colonial Anglican churches was the practice of the Congregationalists of placing the pulpit in the center of the east wall behind the altar. This would have violated their ingrained concept of the separation of chancel from nave and would have been considered an irreverence to the altar. This practice was introduced after 1780 by innovators, but belongs to the period of liturgical debasement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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