Saint Mark’S Church, Philadelphia, from 1847

By Gerald Klever, PhD

This is a nontraditional story of the people of an Episcopal parish that was born in center city Philadelphia in 1847 not many decades after the American Episcopal Church broke with the Church of England. By distinct choice, Saint Marks founders built an Anglican church, feeling that the Church of England journeyed too far from its Anglo-Catholic roots. These Victorian-era people and those who followed them gave magnificent gifts abundantly to their church. But they also built, operated, and staffed missions, chapels, and churches in Philadelphia and the nation. They could, did, and still do have an impact beyond their parish. This is their story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503574809

Gerald Klever, PhD

Gerald Klever became enchanted with the stories of the people of Saint Mark’s Church. Evidence of their bounteous giving and mission funding was obvious, but who were they beyond their gifts? He compiled all kinds of interesting stories as he dug ever deeper using the church’s archives and Philadelphia’s numerous historical research facilities. His skills as a researcher for his PhD from the University of Chicago, interest in people as training officer for the Peace Corps, and writing as a journalism major guided him. His last book, “As It Was Written: The New Testament in Chronological Order,” was published by Xlibris in 2008.

Book preview

Saint Mark’s Church,

Philadelphia, Fro3m 1847

Gerald Klever, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2015 by Gerald Klever, Ph.D.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015908788

ISBN:                  Hardcover                   978-1-5035-7478-6

                            Softcover                     978-1-5035-7479-3

                            eBook                          978-1-5035-7480-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 08/20/2015

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Contents

Preface

Part 1 Before Saint Mark’s Church

Part 2 Saint Mark’s Church From 1847

The Founders Of The New Church

Architecture: Gothic Revival Style

The Architect: John Notman

The Bells Controversy

Saint Mark’s Confronts Racism

The Sisters Of Saint Margaret

The Cloister

The Lady Chapel

The Aeolian-Skinner Organ, Opus 948

Saint Mark’s Confronts Hunger

Saint Mark’s Confronts The Hiv/Aids Epidemic

Saint Mark’s Confronts Medical Needs In Honduras

Saint Mark’s Confronts The Educational Needs Of Under-Resourced Students

Appendix A Founder’s Biographies

Appendix B Selected Member’s Biographies

Appendix C Architects And Designers Of Saint Mark’s

Appendix D Parish Statistics For Selected Years

Appendix E Rectors, Wardens, And Vestrymen; First Baptisms, First Marriages, And First Confirmations

Appendix F The Tower Bells

Sources

Notes

Acknowledgements

To Anita, for her fresh ideas

and unwavering encouragement,

and to Katrina and Chad.

Preface

Writing a book like this must be similar to an archaeologist searching for a beautiful vase that is somewhere in the midst of the dig. He finds pieces, dusts them off, and assembles them only to realize that even though most of the pieces are there, some are lost and cannot be retrieved. The vase is imperfectly restored but still reveals clues about its beauty and how it was used. So it is with the history of a venerable church. Digging into its archives, you find various pieces but not all. Still, most of the church’s history can be reconstructed to learn about its beauty and functions.

In compiling this history of Saint Mark’s Church, I emphasized four facets.

1. Stories about people and parish. I found a treasure of exciting stories about the church’s dynamic people and their spiritual and material gifts, how the parish emerged and its interactions with the neighborhood and events of the times. These articulate voices from long ago and more recently speak of their perseverance in the faith in spite of some missteps within the parish and adversity without. The components of parish life that seem commonplace today were preceded by careful thinking about worship practices as well as hard work to carry out the meaning of faith in the center of a changing, bustling city.

I found that early members seemed to possess a gene that compelled them to give away part of their good fortune to others in Philadelphia and across the world. They filled the church with masterpieces and initiated far-reaching missions. Yet, Father William H. Dunphy, Saint Mark’s ninth rector, cautions parishioners in his preface to the 1946 Annual Parish Report:

God has blessed us abundantly in our heritage, but as Father Vernon [Dunphy’s predecessor] was never tired of repeating, What has been given to us must be given through us. We are stewards of what has been given to us, and like all stewards we shall have to give account to the real Owner.¹

2. Parish life within its culture. How did the parish exist in its continuously changing milieu? Placing Saint Mark’s in its historical context allows readers to learn how its clergy and people responded to their times. Saint Mark’s’ information is here organized in a timeline alongside societal events so readers may interpret the interactions taking place. The right-hand column labeled Ancillary Events includes events in religion, churches, culture, the United States, and the world occurring at the same time as, or that effect, events at Saint Mark’s. For example, if you are searching for events occurring during World War I, you can easily turn to those dates to discover that the parish released its organist/choirmaster to fight (and die) in Europe and how it continued its work during the war years.

3. Consolidation. This book attempts to compile information from many historical accounts into one. Stories were assembled from the parish’s four primary resource books, all out of print:

• The Reverend Alfred Garnett Mortimer’s tome, S. Mark’s Church, Philadelphia, and its Lady Chapel: With an Account of its History and Treasures, New York: Private printing by DeVinne Press, 1909, a gift to the parish by Rodman Wanamaker.

• Claude W. Gilkyson’s Saint Mark’s: One Hundred Years on Locust Street, 1948, 120 pages.

• George Wharton Pepper and N. Crenshaw McElroy’s The Parochial Centenary of St. Mark’s Church, 1948, 12 pages.

• Thomas A. Miller’s Bells On Trial, Bells Restored, The Story of the Bells of Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia, March, 2000, 32 pages.

Searches were also made in vestry minutes; annual reports; parish records of confirmations, births, marriages, and deaths; miscellaneous notes; master’s theses; and other documents in the church’s archives; The Athenaeum of Philadelphia; The Library Company of Philadelphia; The Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Free Library of Philadelphia; and elsewhere.

4. Verification. Stories were verified by using documented facts from at least one, and preferably more, sources. Some stories told over the years became embellished and inaccurate. For instance, there is no clear evidence that ladies with long hatpins tried to pry precious stones out of the newly installed silver altar in the Lady Chapel. And no verifiable evidence exists that Fernanda Wanamaker died as a result of childbirth. A maxim of historical research is that older events have several interpretations and recent events are described more accurately. The playwright Ain Gordon talks about listening to his relatives tell stories at family gatherings. The story was slightly different each time they told it. When he asked about the discrepancy, the teller would say that the latest version was true.

Some stories cannot be verified because the records do not exist or are not available, such as Rodman Wanamaker’s personal notes about building the Lady Chapel. For instance, why did he change altars? When the record went dark, secondary sources were sought, but not always successfully. Accuracy has been checked using the sources and footnotes listed at the end of the book. Unless otherwise attributed, all other material comes from the church’s archives.

Readers may draw their own interpretations of the stories and facts written in this book; my task was to find and report them.

Notes

The active voice (is versus was, and are versus were, for example) is used as much as possible so readers may participate in the urgency of the moment in which the events occurred.

PART I includes national and neighborhood events before Saint Mark’s Church was founded.

PART II tells of events within the parish beginning with the founder’s first meeting in 1847.

PART 1

Before Saint Mark’s Church

When George and Martha Washington live in Philadelphia, they often attend Christ Church (Episcopal) at Second and North American Streets where their close personal friend, Bishop William White, leads worship. The Washingtons attend mass² because of Martha’s influence. Her family’s religious roots in the Church of England develop in the American Protestant Episcopal Church.³ However, Washington is considered to be a Deist, along with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and other founders of the American republic.⁴ Their beliefs pave the way for a secularist American government in which a state religion or a specific religious denomination does not guide the new country. And it gives Washington the freedom to welcome people of all faiths to the president’s office.

In Center City, Philadelphia, three Episcopal churches precede Saint Mark’s. (Saint Mark’s was the seventeenth Episcopal Church built in the entire city, according to records of the Diocese of Pennsylvania.)

• Christ Church is the first parish church of the Church of England in America, established in 1695 and later built at Second and North American Streets.

• The Saint James Church building (now defunct) officially dates from 1721, with services held since 1700.

• Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church, at Third and Pine Streets, celebrates its first mass on September 4, 1761.

Known as the United Churches, these early Episcopal parishes follow English ecclesiastical lineage and patronage until the Revolutionary War when they boldly declare freedom from the British crown. In 1789, two years after Pennsylvania becomes a state, this religious revolution places American Episcopal clergy and church leaders in jeopardy. The British consider these declarations to be traitorous acts that could merit severe punishment by the Crown.

While other clergy are loyal to the British mother church, the Reverend William White, chaplain (1777-1789), during the second and third meetings of the Continental Congress and, later, chaplain of the Senate, is an Episcopal clergyman who chooses to support the American revolutionists. In 1782, Father White lays out his plan for changing the church’s government while maintaining its theological stance and form of worship in The Case of the Episcopal Churches in the United States Considered.

On February 4, 1787, White is consecrated bishop by the Archbishop of Canterbury and York. Upon arriving back in the United States, he becomes the first presiding bishop of the new Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania (and the second Episcopal bishop in the United States after Samuel Seabury in 1784). White is elected parish rector of Christ Church in April, 1799, and later also serves as the rector of Saint James’ and Saint Peter’s. He serves these parishes for fifty-seven years until his death. As bishop, he guides Episcopal parishes into a mutually supportive diocese, convincing loyalist and non-loyalist priests to work together. He ordains Absalom Jones as deacon and priest, opening the door for black clergy. He is deeply involved in several community organizations ministering to poor, hungry and unemployed people in Philadelphia. Bishop White dies on June 17, 1836, eleven years before Saint Mark’s is founded.⁵

image001.jpg

Bishop William White (April 4, 1748-July 17, 1836)

(Photo by the author from a painting in the Bishop White House, restored and managed by the National Park Service. Used with its permission)

In the late 1700s, Philadelphia is still a small city. Most of its citizens live close to the Delaware River on the east. Parcels of land on the west near the Schuykill River are largely unsettled. By the early 1800s, Philadelphia’s population expands westward from the Delaware River. Much of this movement is at about the same time as the Industrial Revolution that starts in Europe in the 1760s and lasts until the 1820s-1870s in the United States.

image002.jpg

Map showing Philadelphia between the Delaware River (right) and the Schuylkill River (left) in the early 1800s. Nicholas Scull (1686 (?)-1761 (?)), engraver, and George Heap (1715-1760), surveyor.

(Map used by permission of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

The land around Saint Mark’s future site contains abundant cheap clay with which to make bricks. It is called Goosetown Village because geese are attracted to the water that collects in the area’s clay pit ponds located in the midst of open pastures. The map below shows several large clay pits around Walnut, Locust, and Chestnut Streets. Part of Saint Mark’s Church would be built over a filled clay pond.

map001.jpg

An 1838 map showing the clay ponds and brickyards surrounding the eventual location of Saint Mark’s Church. The church is shown at the rectangle marked with a cross, built partially over a reclaimed clay pond. The map shows clay ponds between Broad and Second Streets, Market and Spruce.

(Map used by permission of The Library Company of Philadelphia)

The Rittenhouse area. In 1815, residents of this area loan Philadelphia’s City Council $800 to erect a fence around Southwest Square, one of the five green squares that William Penn planned for his city. Ten years later, residents petition the council to rename it Rittenhouse Square.⁶

By the 1820s, immigrants living near the Schuykill River unload coal from barges that dock on the banks, weave canvas for sails, work in the brickyards, weave cloth, and operate small family shops. Most seamen live in temporary quarters on a few streets and lanes located near the river. Further inland, small houses and boarding houses exist among brickyards south and west of where the church will be located. Shops and carpenter’s workshops are located to the north and east of the church’s eventual site.

Many workers are single, having left their families overseas while they seek a better life in America. They intend to bring their families to these shores, but the pay is poor and living conditions are minimal. Groups of workers and families crowd into three story, one-room-on-a-floor, Father/Son/Holy Ghost houses. Each of these Trinity houses lacks sanitation and running water; residents share a community water pump and outdoor privy.

In the short span from the 1820s to the 1840s, the area around the church’s eventual location rapidly changes from brickmaking yards, breweries, woodworker’s shops, glass blower’s ovens, and marble yards to an eclectic residential area where mansions are built next to the small houses of working people.⁷ The population changes from workers with little or no influence in the city to leaders with positions of authority in business and government—locally, nationally, and internationally. Much of the power of these new entrepreneurs comes from the development of coal mining, steam power, machine tools, and imports of sugar, foods, linens and fabrics, during the second Industrial Revolution (1840-1870).

Two churches, Brickmaker’s and Saint Patrick’s, are built before and near the future Saint Mark’s. These churches reflect the varied religious and cultural climate of the neighborhood.

Cholera and the Brickmaker’s Church. On July 5, 1832, the first case of cholera arrives in West Philadelphia. People traveling from New York to Philadelphia carry the disease, trapping working poor people who cannot afford to leave the city.

image004.jpg

Cholera poster (from healthline.com)

According to public records, about 5,000 people die from the disease in New York and 779 die in Philadelphia. Itinerant Methodist preachers, who have tried to establish a church in the area, hold house prayer meetings for the sick and dying. These well-attended meetings eventually lead to the construction of the Western Methodist Church, known as the Brickmaker’s Church, at Twentieth Street near Walnut, the first church established near Rittenhouse Square. Owners of brickmaking plants and lumberyards donate materials to build this church. It claims 200 members and provides worship services for working-class residents from the 1830s for about 20 years. The Brickmaker’s Church, born in response to a devastating disease and built with the contributions of brickyard owners and their workers, no longer exists.⁸

Rioting and Saint Patrick’s Church. Irish Catholic immigrant coal heavers and brick makers call a strike in 1837 because they want to be paid the same wages for ten-hour days as unionized, skilled workers. Many of these immigrants form Saint Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church two years later in a rented frame building. On July 4, 1841, they lay the cornerstone for their new church, designed by Napoleon LeBrun, at the corner of Twentieth and Murray Streets (now Rittenhouse Street).

It is a difficult time to form an immigrant Roman Catholic parish in America because some citizens feel that immigrants, especially Irish newcomers, take jobs from native-born Americans. This sentiment results in the founding of the Native American Party as a political party in Germantown in 1837. (It is often called the Know-Nothing Party, because members of a group within the party, the secretive Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, pledge themselves to say, I know nothing when asked about the organization.) From 1840 to 1850, the party has a reputation for staging extreme nationalistic, anti-Catholic rallies and promoting candidates who pledge to exclude the foreign-born from political power in the United States. They merge with the Republican Party when their influence ebbs in later years.⁹

Tensions increase. On May 6, 1844, a mob composed mostly of Know-Nothing Party members marches with torches, muskets, and pistols from the Kensington area southeastward into the Rittenhouse Square area to surround the new Saint Patrick’s Church to fight against the foreign Catholics. Saint Patrick’s members and other nearby residents surround and defend the church. Rioting continues for five days. Forty people die, a few nearby houses are set afire, businesses shuttered, and the violence spills over to the torching of other nearby churches. There is no organized city police force at the time. After a few days, city officials appeal to private citizens to confront about four thousand rioters and put down the mayhem. Saint Patrick’s Church, built by Irish immigrants amid struggles, still celebrates mass at 220 South Twentieth Street, a block west of Rittenhouse Square.

The Neighborhood Quickly Changes. The first great house in the Rittenhouse Square area is a Greek Revival mansion built at 1801 Walnut Street by Philip Physick, the son of Dr. Philip Syng Physick, called the father of American surgery. (Dr. Physick’s patients include President Andrew Jackson, Dolley Madison, Benjamin Rush, and John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.¹⁰) After Dr. Physick’s death in 1837, his son Philip uses his inheritance to buy five adjoining lots at the northeast corner of Nineteenth and Walnut Streets upon which to build a large mansion in 1842. The son’s house is called Physick’s Folly because it stands out in the countryside, surrounded by small working-class houses and vegetable patches. Three years later, James Harper, a brickyard owner and former congressman, builds a large house on Walnut Street between Eighteenth and Nineteenth Streets (now the Rittenhouse Club). These Victorian mansions are built next to worker’s houses that begin to disappear.

By the end of the 1840s, transportation increases to the Rittenhouse area, the neighborhood surrounded by High Street (now Market Street, named for the farmer’s markets established down its center) to the north, to South Street on the south, Broad Street on the east, and to the river to the west. The last clay ponds near Rittenhouse Square are drained and filled with earth, streets built, trees planted, and gaslights installed in the neighborhood.

Mansion-building increases in the blocks around where Saint Mark’s is built. For an example of the wealth of their owners and the magnitude of their buildings, consider Joseph Harrison, Jr. As heir to a sugar fortune, he is thought to be one of the country’s wealthiest men. Harrison is an entrepreneur like many who choose to live in the area. He designs a steam–powered railroad engine, sells it to the Russian government, and makes a fortune.¹¹ In 1847, Harrison begins to build his estate at 225 South Eighteenth Street near Locust Street, on the west side of Rittenhouse Square. It is completed five years later. His new palatial mansion helps establish the Rittenhouse area as a prestige location. The elegant Harrison house is modeled on the Pavlovsk Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia, that Joseph Harrison’s wife, Sarah, admires while he works in Russia. The Palace is an eighteenth-century Russian Imperial residence built by Paul I of Russia in the city of Pavlovsk near Saint Petersburg. The buildings and grounds there are now a state museum and park.

image005.jpg

The Harrison Mansion at 225 South Eighteenth Street

(Photo courtesy of the city of Philadelphia)

Harrison’s mansion consists of a gallery to house his large collection of original oil paintings by American artists,¹² an octagonal greenhouse, stables and adjacent rental houses. The Harrison house is demolished in 1923 for the development of a multistory luxury apartment building. In 1856, Harrison Row (ten adjacent houses), is built in the 1700 block of Locust Street by Joseph Harrison, Jr., who rents them to personally selected clients. Saint Mark’s first rector lives temporarily in one of these houses until the church builds the rectory next to the church. The occupants of these houses are also linked to the history of Saint Mark’s Church because of their objections to the sound and other nuisances of the church’s bells in 1876. (See The Bells Controversy.)

image0011111.jpg

Joseph Harrison, Jr.’s block of rental houses on Locust between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Streets, west of Saint Mark’s Church

(Photo courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia)

John Notman, Saint Mark’s architect, and Samuel Sloan design many of the houses in this area in the Italianate style.

Professor Reed’s Inquiry. In April, 1841, Henry Hope Reed, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature since 1835 at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, reads Tracts of the Times from the Tractarian Society in Oxford, England, and sends a letter of inquiry to William Wordsworth, the poet, in Britain. Reed is Wordsworth’s American editor.

There is a subject which from time to time has occurred to my mind and which I have felt a strong desire to introduce to your consideration … it is the suggestion of an historical subject closely connected with your Ecclesiastical Sonnets… the transmission of the spiritual functions of the Church of England to the daughter Church in this Western Continent, by the consecration of American Bishops … It was a great thing for America to receive—and how holy a temper seems to have prevailed in the whole transaction …

Wordsworth responds by sending his sonnet to Reed:

Patriots informed with Apostolic light

Were they who, when their Country has been freed,

Bowing with reverence to the ancient creed,

Fixed on the frame of England’s Church their sight,

And strove in filial love to reunite

What force had severed. Thence they fetched the seed

Of Christian unity, and won a meed

Of praise from Heaven. To thee, O saintly White! (Referring to the Right Reverend William White, the

first Bishop of Pennsylvania and Mrs. Reed’s grandfather.)

Patriarch of a wide-spread Family,

Remotest lands and unborn times shall turn—

Whether they would restore or build—to Thee,

As one who rightly taught how zeal should burn,

As one who drew from out faith’s holiest Urn

The purest stream of patient Energy.¹³

Charles Gilkyson writes that the ideas contained in the Tracts are felt on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Saint Mark’s Church Is Founded. In 1847, Dr. Reed, considered to be the most prominent man of letters in Philadelphia, invites representatives of several Episcopal churches to meet in June at the home of George and Caroline Zantzinger at the northwest corner of 16th Schuykill and Locust Streets to form a new church based on Anglican principles. Reed and others feel that the Episcopal Church in America has ventured too far from its Catholic roots. Christopher Lane offers a companion theory in "The Age of Doubt, Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty" (Yale University Press, 2011). He writes that such people are participants in the explosion of questioning among Christian thinkers in the Victorian era that transform the idea of doubt as a lapse of faith (or a sin) into thinking of doubt as an honest and acceptable exploration.

In theology, ritual and practice, this new church is to be an intentional Anglo-Catholic parish based on the tenets of the Book of Common Prayer in the USA (established October 16, 1789) and the influence of the Oxford Movement, the Tractarian Society, and the Cambridge Camden Society of Great Britain. A capsule description of these groups is included here for readers who may be unfamiliar with them:

The Oxford Movement. If there is a single starting point for the Oxford Movement, it is probably in 1833 when John Keble, a priest and professor of poetry at Oxford University, preaches a sermon titled National Apostasy that opposes the secularization of the Anglican Church in England and its increasing dependency on Parliament for religious matters. Keble pleads for restoring the sacramental emphasis of a more catholic theology. Oxford University becomes the academic and theological location for the call of the Church to return to the historical episcopal legacy on which it is founded¹⁴ but which the Church of England had abandoned. The Oxford Fellows are churchmen disturbed by what they call the lamentable condition of the Church of England ¹⁵.

The goal of the Oxford faculty/priests is to reestablish Anglo-Catholicism, which affirms and restores the Roman Catholic heritage, liturgy, and theology of Anglican churches not regulated by the English Parliament. Richard William Church mentions that Even more than theological reform, the Oxford Movement was a protest against the loose unreality of ordinary religious morality.¹⁶ Oxford theologians and scholars are in this movement are committed to individual piety, education, and episcopacy in an Anglican Church. They also affirm