USA > Rhode Island > Providence County > Providence > State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at the end of the century : a history, Volume 2 > Part 16
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THE BIRTHPLACE OF GILBERT STUART, NORTH KINGSTOWN.
Lippitt family, and Judge John Cole. During Dr. MacSparran's ministry the painter, Gilbert Stuart, was born in the parish and bap- tized by him in the Narragansett church. Seldom has it been granted to a pastor to impress his individuality so deeply upon a community and to leave his name as a household word throughout such a broad section, a century and a half after his death, as did James MacSparran.
The successor of Dr. MacSparran in St. Paul's Church was the Rev. Samuel Fayerweather, a good but eccentric man, who did not arrive
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until nearly three years after the death of the old pastor, to find the congregation greatly reduced, the church having been so long elosed. He continued to officiate with aceeptableness from 1760 to 1774, about which time a controversy concerning the prayers for the king, which he felt compelled to continue to use against the wishes of a majority of the congregation, caused the ehurel to be elosed. Upon his deatlı in 1781 Mr. Fayerweather was buried under the Communion table of St. Paul's, beside the body of Dr. MaeSparran, where they both still lie, the spot having been marked sinee the removal of the ehureh by a granite eross.
St. Michael's Church, Bristol, the third colonial parish established in what is now Rhode Island, although then a part of Plymouth Colony, is commonly said to have originated in 1719, although services in a private house were held still earlier in the eentury.
Among the first settlers of the town there were some attached to the Church of England and movements were made, at least as soon as the above mentioned date, looking to the founding of a parish. By 1720 the Bishop of London had received a letter from prominent citizens of Bristol asking for the appointment of a Church of England min- ister, and promising that a church should be built for him, nearly a thousand pounds having been raised by the inhabitants.
Aeeordingly, in the following year the Rev. James Orem was sent out by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel upon a salary of sixty pounds. He found an incomplete ehureh edifiee, with a steeple but with no floor. Soon a large congregation was gathered and every- thing seemed promising, when, after a little more than a year, the missionary aeeepted a more eongenial position and withdrew. It was at about this date that twelve men of the ehureh were imprisoned, under the law of Massachusetts, for refusing to pay toward the support of the Puritan minister of the town, a proceeding which may have helped to dampen the ardor of the new pastor.
The second missionary sent by the Society to Bristol, in 1723, was the Rev. John Usher, a graduate of Harvard College and a son of the lieutenant-governor of New Hampshire. Mr. Usher proved the man for the place and was at onee and always successful. He found the parish fceble and dwindling, but by his tireless solieitude built up a vigorous church and to a large degree, by his wisdom and power of conciliation, disarmed the former Puritan opponents of the enterprise. In 1724-5 there were forty-five families reported in the eongregation and thirty communieants. In the first vestry, eleeted in 1724, there were found, among others, Major Ebenezer Brenton, William Munro, William Walker, Obadiah Papillion and Nathaniel Bosworth.
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So great was the increase of the congregation that, in 1731, galleries had to be introduced into the church and in that same year Nathaniel Kay, the benefactor of Newport Church, as has been related, bestowed a valuable farm on St. Michael's Church for a school similar to that which he provided for in his own parish. Although now the "ten poor boys" find suitable instruction in the excellent public schools of the town, the parish still derives income from Mr. Kay's liberality.
It is encouraging to the friends of religious freedom to find, in 1744, the town of Bristol, apparently actuated by its own more enlightened convictions, but also, no doubt, somewhat as a result of the liberal sentiment prevailing in the neighboring territory of Rhode Island, petitioning the General Court of Massachusetts to be allowed to ar- range that the two congregations may impose, each upon its own adher- ents, a tax for the support of its minister.
After January 1, 1746-7, Bristol having been annexed to Rhode Island, no more votes upon religious questions were taken in town meeting.
The beloved and revered rector, after a faithful ministry of fifty- two years and at the age of seventy-five, rested from his labors on April 30, 1775, only eleven days after the battle of Lexington, being, like the Puritan pastor, Mr. Burt, spared the sight of the painful struggle to follow. During his long pastorate Mr. Usher baptized seven hundred and thirteen persons, attended two hundred and seventy-four funerals and solemnized matrimony one hundred and eighty-five times. He made the welfare of the church the whole busi- ness of his life. Dr. Henry Caner, "the Father of the American Clergy", after having served as rector of King's Chapel, Boston, for thirty years, was appointed in 1776 honorary missionary of St. Mi- chael's by the venerable Society, but does not appear ever to have visited the town, inasmuch as, being a royalist, he fled that same year from Boston to Halifax and thence to England.
Two years later, in May 1778, St. Michael's Church was burned by British soldiers on an expedition from the island of Rhode Island, and the parish seemed to have been almost extinguished.
St. John's Church, Providence .- The last to be established of the four colonial parishes of Rhode Island was King's Church, later St. John's, Providence. It is believed that as early as 1720, good, earnest Parson Honyman had come up from Newport to preach in the growing town at the head of Narragansett Bay. At about that time he is said to have written to the Society concerning "the want of a missionary at a town called Providence", where "through the want of instruction,
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the people were become quite rude, and void of all knowledge in relig- ion, yet," it is gratifying to learn, "they were of a good and teachable disposition". Farther, Mr. Honyman reported how, in the year 1722, he had preached in Providence "to the greatest number of people he had ever had together since he eame to Ameriea", and how "no house being able to hold them he was obliged to preach in the fields".
Near the same period Gabriel Bernon, who seems to have possessed the gift of ecclesiastical ubiquity and who was, as we have noticed, active and zealous in the interests of the church at Newport and in Narragansett as well as at Providenee, corresponded with Dr. Mac- Sparran with a view to settling"in our town of Providenee one learned minister of good condition-an Old England gentleman minister". It appears to have been as a direet result of Mr. Honyman's appeals that the people of Providenee started upon the enterprise of raising money to build a church.
Soon they had gathered seven hundred and seventy pounds and on St. Barnabas Day, June 11, 1722, began to build the plain edifiee, with low belfry and round-headed windows, which supplied the wants of the parish for eighty-eight years. In 1723 eame the first missionary of the Society, the Rev. George Pigot, from Stratford, Connecticut, where he had been previously stationed.
Still earlier Mr. Pigot had served as a schoolmaster in Newport, marrying there, about 1717, Sarah, only child of Francis Carr, a ship- wright of that town. Mrs. Pigot inherited from her father extensive lands in Warwiek and after returning to Rhode Island from her brief residence in Connecticut built a substantial house upon them for the use of her family. Hence arose the singular anomaly that the first rec- tory of King's (or St. John's) Church, Providence, should have been situated more than a dozen miles away, in the heart of the primeval forest. Mr. Pigot remained only four years in his office in Providenee, becoming, in 1727, reetor of St. Michael's Church in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and later returning to England.
The most distinguished of the early reetors of King's Church was the Rev. Jolin Cheekley, born in Boston in 1680, and for many years a publisher and bookseller there. He visited England no less than three tinies to obtain ordination, but, owing to the misrepresentations of his enemies, failed in liis object until 1739, when, already in his sixtieth year, he was ordained by the Bishop of Exeter. From that date until his death in 1754 Mr. Cheekley was settled in Providenee, attending even in advanced age steadily to his duties. He was a noted contro- versialist and possessed remarkable skill in the Indian language in use
ST. JOHN'S EPISCOPAL CHURCH, PROVIDENCE,
AS IT ORIGINALLY APPEARED. FROM A COPPER PLATE ENGRAV- ING IN THE POSSESSION OF THE RHODE ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY. THIS PLATE WAS MADE FROM A DRAWING BY ZACHARIAH ALLEN.
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in Rhode Island, enjoying a close acquaintance with the natives them- selves.
Mr. Checkley was succeeded by the Rev. John Graves who had been vicar of Clapham, in Cheshire, England, and was sent to Providence by the Society in 1754. Mr. Graves remained through the trouble- some times of the Revolution, refraining, however, from officiating after the Declaration of Independence, because not permitted to offer prayers for the king. He continued to be regarded as a missionary of the S. P. G. until 1782 and died in 1785.
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel .- Nothing is more noticeable, in connection with the colonial Episcopal Church in Rhode Island, than the enormousness of the debt she incurred to the venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. It is not too much to say that, under God, she owed her existence to that organi- zation. Every one of the four early churches, except Trinity Church, Newport, was planted as well as nourished by the Society.
While it is true that Trinity by some three years antedated the existence of that organization, it is yet probable that had it not been for the subsequent nursing care of the Society, the feeble enterprise would have proved as shortlived as did similar ones in other places. At the critical point when, after the departure of the first minister in probable discouragement, the fate of the church was trembling in the balance, there came as a representative of the Society a sturdy and faithful soldier of the Cross, to stand in his lot for almost a half century and place the undertaking on an inviolable foundation. No fewer than thirteen missionaries, in all, were sent to the four Rhode Island parishes during the colonial period, and derived from it their chief support. Not less than eighteen or twenty thousand dollars were contributed by the Society to St. John's parish alone, and not much less than one hundred thousand dollars, on the whole, to the churches in Rhode Island.
The Transitional Period .- After the independence of the American Episcopal Church had followed, as a necessary result, the establishment of National Independence, there ensued in Rhode Island a period of nearly a half century, during which she did little more than regain her former strength and hold her own.
When Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown in 1781 substantially ter- minated the contest betweent Great Britain and America, there were four Episcopal parishes within the State. At the opening of the year 1829 there were still only five. The general condition of the church at the close of the Revolutionary War was most pitiable. Trinity,
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Newport, was for years without a pastor, her property in a state of dilapidation, her people discouraged, party spirit raging within the parish and the edifice itself being occupied for several years by a min- ister of the Six Principle Baptist order.
The Narragansett church, too, was unopened for worship for a dozen years or more, having been used as a barrack for the American soldiery during the war.
St. Michael's, Bristol, lay in ashes. King's church, Providence, was closed against its rector, who desired, at the restoration of peace, to resume his public ministrations. To the human eye the Episcopal Church in Rhode Island seemed ready to die.
The First Diocesan Convention .- The natal day of the Diocese of Rhode Island was November 18, 1790, the date of the first Diocesan Convention. By that time the parishes had begun to revive from their depression, all having for several years enjoyed the services of a rector except Bristol, which, although the church had been rebuilt, was still served by only a zealous lay-reader, a son of the last rector. The Rev. William Smith, the brilliant introducer of chanting into the American church and the compiler of the Office of Institution in the Prayer Book, was ministering at Newport, having just closed a pastorate of three years in Narragansett. In Providence the Rev. Moses Badger was in the midst of a rectorate lasting a half dozen years, one of his successors, in 1801, being the Rev. Nathaniel Bowen, later Bishop of South Carolina. During the colonial period there had been frequently held New England Conventions of the clergy alone, as for example those of 1743 and 1745 at Newport, and that of 1768 at King's Chapel, Boston. But never, apparently, had there been convened an assembly of both the clergy and the laity of Rhode Island, by itself, before that of 1790, at Newport.
Three churches-those of Providence, Bristol and Newport-were represented in this convention by two clergymen and five laymen, their first action being to approve the use of the revised Book of Common Prayer and to give a unanimous adherence to the Canons adopted by the General Convention, held in Philadelphia in the autumn before.
Previously to the Declaration of Independence the Bishop of London for the time being had exercised ecclesiastical jurisdiction in British foreign plantations, by virtue of an order of King Charles I in Council, renewed by Charles II; Rhode Island, in common with the rest of the American Colonies, being of course and as a fact included under his authority. The most important action of the convention of 1790 was a
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declaration that Samuel Seabury, Bishop of Conneetieut, was also "Bishop of the Church of this State".
Three years later Bishop Seabury was present in convention, in order to ordain Mr. Usher to be minister at Bristol, and appears to have continued to exereise jurisdiction in Rhode Island until his death in 1796, Bishop Bass of Massachusetts being (in 1798) chosen to suc- ceed him. When Bishop Bass died in 1803 the election fell upon Bishop Moore of New York, but whether or not he aeeepted and exercised jurisdiction does not ap- pear to be recorded. In 1809 the Rhode Island Convention took ae- tion toward a union with Massa- chusetts, New Hampshire and Ver- mont, for the formation of the Eastern Dioccse, resulting in the eleetion of Alexander Viets Gris- wold as bishop of the four States in 1811.
The First Dioccsan Bishop .- The eleetion of Bishop Griswold, who was already reetor of St. Michael's, Bristol, formed an era in the his- tory of the Rhode Island ehureh, and was, doubtless, a prime factor THE R'T. REV. ALEX. V. GRISWOLD, D. D. in preparing the way for the period of remarkable growth and prosper- ity which opened before a seore of years had gone by. Bishop Gris- wold was a man of a most elevated and saintly character, utterly devoted to the duties of his offiee. While meek and gentle in his demeanor, he was still singularly shrewd and possessed of a good knowledge of men. His mere presence was a kind of benediction.
While, previously, Rhode Island had enjoyed only the nominal and fitful serviees of a non-resident bishop, whose actual interests were bound up in his own field, she now had dwelling, in the midst of the Dioeese, one of the best bishops the American church has ever pro- dueed. It happened, likewise, that St. Michael's parish at Bristol was rejoieing in a period of singular spiritual elevation, under the ministrations of Bishop Griswold. When he had removed to the town in 1804, as an unknown clergyman from Connecticut, the church there included only about twenty-five families and an even smaller number
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of communicants, although it soon showed signs of deeided growth. But it seemed as if the raising of the rector to the highest order of the ministry stimulated, still farther, all that was best and noblest in his nature. Faithful before to a high degree, he was thus led to develop an enlarged faithfulness. In 1812, the year after the conseeration of Bishop Griswold, there oeeurred in his church at Bristol a most notable revival of religious interest. It was not the result of any preconcerted movement. The "wind blew where it listed" and the Spirit was poured out upon the congregation without stint. The wheels of indus- try for the time stood almost still in the village, many of the shops were elosed and the population floeked day after day to the House of God. One hundred names were added at onee to the Holy Communion list of St. Michael's. The parish, feeble and small before, was consol- idated and established by that revival into one of the strongest country parishes in New England and the very strongest in Rhode Island, a distinetion which the passage of nearly a century has not dimmed.
In 1819, when he who was afterwards the eminent Dr. Stephen H. Tyng of St. George's Church, New York, came to study theology with Bishop Griswold at Bristol, he thought he had then never seen a more flourishing church, and when sixty years more had passed he declared that he had never seen one since. In 1820 there occurred, under the devout Bishop's administration, a second potent revival, when more than one hundred were confirmed as a result. These movements, start- ing in St. Michael's Church, extended not only through the town, but to more distant parts of the State. The Rev. Nathan B. Crocker, who had been elected rector of St. John's Church, Providenee, in 1807, and under whose pastorate, in 1810, the present stone structure had re- placed the old wooden building of 1722, felt the gracious influence of the revival of 1812 and was stimulated to sueh inereased fervor in his preaching that many were converted and gathered into the fold, the reetor never again, until his death in 1865. relapsing into the eold, moral discourses of his earlier ministry. Bishop Griswold continued to live in Bristol until 1830, when he removed, for the sake of being nearer the center of his extensive Dioeese, to Massachusetts. Besides Stephen H. Tyng, already alluded to, Samuel Brenton Shaw, J. H. Coit, J. P. K. Henshaw, afterwards Bishop of Rhode Island, and other young men to the number of at least a dozen, studied for the ministry with the rector of St. Michael's and drew lifelong inspiration from the heaven- ly atmosphere diffused around him. The universal estimate of Bishop Griswold was voiced by an honest, although uncultured, countryman-
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"He was an uncommon perfect man. You could find no fault with him no way".
Trinity Church, Newport .- During the earlier years of Mr. Gris- wold's service at Bristol there was ministering at Newport a rector of unusual ability and devotedness, the Rev. Theodore Dehon. Mr. Dehon entered upon the duties of the parish in 1798, finding it consid- erably divided but proving so acceptable that it was soon reunited in the bonds of harmony and Christian fellowship and flourished and increased to an overflowing congregation. The pews were again all occupied to a degree almost equal to what they had been in Mr. Hony- man's days of pre-eminent prosperity. When Mr. Dehon resigned the charge of Trinity Church in 1810, it was to become the rector of St. Michael's Church, Charleston, S. C., and soon afterwards, the bishop of that Diocese. He was succeeded by the Rev. Salmon Whea- ton, who then entered upon a rectorship of thirty years.
The first parish reports introduced into the Journals of Convention are found in that of 1813. At that time St. Michael's, Bristol, had about ninety families and one hundred and forty-eight communicants ; Trinity, Newport, one hundred and five communicants ; and St. John's Providence fifty-nine, St. Paul's, Narragansett, not reporting.
St. Paul's Church, Pawtucket-The only permanent parish added to the diocese of Rhode Island during the period we are reviewing, from 1781 to 1829, was St. Paul's Church, Pawtucket. In the year 1790 the first cotton mill in America was started at that village by Samuel Slater, leading to a large increase of population and material prosperity. Samuel Greene, David Wilkinson, Edward L. Wilkinson and Mr. Slater himself were among those who were early interested in the establishment of an Episcopal church in Pawtucket. In the Jour- nal of 1816 is found the first report of St. Paul's Church, with twenty communicants and the Rev. John L. Blake as rector. It was in this parish that was organized one of the first Sunday Schools in Rhode Island, the secular school on Sunday, started by Samuel Slater in Pawtucket about 1797, having been, as has been noted above, eventually divided between St. Paul's and a Baptist church.
Mr. Blake remained only four or five years in Pawtucket and about 1822 the Rev. George Taft became rector, having been previously an instructor at Brown University, and an occasional officiator at a short-lived mission called Christ Church, Chepachet. Dr. Taft thus entered upon a long and most successful pastorate, during which he built up a strong church, so thoroughly identified with his own earnest personality that he and the church seemed one and the same. At the
ST. PAUL'S CHURCH, PAWTUCKET.
DEMOLISHED 1901.
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present time the parish, in a renewal of its youth, is building a costly stone church to take the place of the time-honored, but now insufficient, structure of wood.
The Tower Hill Church .- There was one other parochial enterprise, which, although it did not prove permanent, must be mentioned in connection with this period-the Tower Hill Church. The Church of St. Paul in Narragansett was ereeted before the division of the old town of Kingstown into the two towns of North and South Kingstown, in 1722-3, the church falling upon the northern side of the dividing line. The location of the edifiee having become inconvenient through the shifting of population, it was, in 1800, removed five miles north- ward to the village of Wiekford, with the understanding that services should be maintained by the reetor in both towns. For a long time this was done, the ministers officiating on alternate Sundays at the Wickford Church and at the old glebe house in South Kingstown, where they still continued to live. At length, however, through the enterprise of the Rev. Lemuel Burge, the reetor at the time, a church was built for the South Kingstown portion of the congregation at Tower Hill, a couple of miles south of the glebe, and eonseerated by Bishop Griswold in November, 1818. It may be mentioned, although not strictly eonneeted with the period under consideration, that it was not until mueh later that a parish was incorporated at Tower Hill, by the name of St. Luke's Church, a name changed, afterwards, to St. Paul's. For six years, after 1834, the Tower Hill Church enjoyed the serviees of reetors of its own distinet from those at Wickford. In 1840 the members of the Tower Hill Church united themselves to the just established Church of the Ascension, Wakefield, and, subsequent- ly, only occasional services were held in the former, until at length the edifiee was altered into a dwelling-house and the parish beeame extinct.
The Condition of the Church in 1829 .- The number of eommuni- eants reported at the Convention in 1829, at the elose of the period under review, was, by St. Michael's, Bristol, one hundred and sixty- two; St. John's Church, Providence, one hundred and sixty ; Trinity Church, Newport, one hundred and twenty-three; St. Paul's Church, Pawtucket, seventy-five ; and St. Paul's Church, Wiekford, forty-three, making a total of five hundred and sixty-three. In the sixteen years sinee the first rendering of reports, the earliest point of comparison available, the number of communicants in the dioeese had inereased by about seventy-five per eent.
The Period of Expansion .- For the first forty or fifty years after
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the attainment of National Independence, the American Episcopal Church at large was engaged principally, as we have seen in the case of the particular portion of it in Rhode Island, in a struggle for exist- ence. At about the close of the first third of the nineteenth century, the Church seems, at last, to have become assured of its position and to have attained a fuller consciousness of its nature and capacity. "Up to this moment", says a writer in 1829, "we have but one small infant station among the heathen, and that chiefly for the purpose of educa- tion, and not a single foreign missionary on any distant shore".
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