To enter St. Peter’s Church at the corner of Third and Pine Streets in Philadelphia is to step into the story of a congregational continuum in an architectural constant. Through 250 years of American history, from the time Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony, people have worshipped God, ministered to the surrounding community and beyond, and found solace and support in this building, which is largely unchanged since it opened for services on September 4, 1761. The founding members held religious ideals that guided the original design of the building. As those ideals evolved through the years, subsequent vestries enlisted some...

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Philadelphia morphed from an understated Quaker town to a city increasingly known for lavish displays of wealth. The appetite for richer visual surroundings, combined with an increasing capacity to keep the shops of talented craftsmen full of work, drew from England and Europe an unprecedented level of talent. The new arrivals after 1760 included Martin Jugiez, who partnered with Nicholas Bernard at their “Looking Glass Store” near Front and Walnut. Bernard and Jugiez sold “Picture Frames, Sconces, Chimney Pieces” imported from London “in the newest Taste.” They also took commissions for “all...

A close look at the situation of the Anglican Church leading up to and during the American Revolution shows the complexity of individual decision-making needed at that time. For the ten years after 1765, the situation became only more difficult, as the move to independence from Britain evolved. Members of the Anglican Church in America were especially conflicted; even more so were the clergy, who upon their ordinations had sworn an oath to serve GodandKing. The attitudes of three clergymen connected with St. Peter’s are noteworthy because of the different approach each took to what he saw as...

Looking at the two photographs shown here, one can see the thread of St. Peter’s sewing time and place together. The photograph below shows the southeast corner of the church, where the cornerstone was laid in September 1758. Just to the right, on the east wall of the church, is the large and once elaborate stone (probably designed by Martin Jugiez; see page 34) marking the burial site of William Bingham, a founder of St. Peter’s, who died in 1769. Among the family members interred in the underground vault with Bingham are John Stamper, whose daughter Mary married Bingham; the...

In the years after the American Revolution and the establishment of the Episcopal Church, the United Churches of Christ Church and St. Peter’s continued under the leadership of Bishop William White. In 1809, with the westward movement of church members in the city and the increasing demand for a new church, St. James was opened on Seventh above Market Street, joining the two other churches under the direction of one vestry and White. But the inevitability of changing times and an aging rector strained the relationship.

The vestry minutes of the United Churches in the last half of the 1820s...

By 1842, St. Peter’s Church had evolved as an institution. The independence of the church, so dearly desired in 1758, had taken more than seventy years to achieve, and now a new generation was looking forward. Many members of the congregation saw the Oxford movement’s call to return to the rituals of early Christianity (see Chapter 7) as a new way to look at their religious life and debated how their antiquated 1761 building should or should not be used. Over the next one hundred-plus years, some of Philadelphia’s most important architects would help the congregation adapt to changing liturgical...

During the years 1836–1845, the Industrial Revolution continued to blaze across Philadelphia. Manufacturing replaced trade as the focus of the city’s commerce. The metamorphosis from the “Athens of America” into the hurly-burly world of mills and factories affected not only the physical appearance of the metropolis but also the emotional character of its residents. It was a time of boldness of vision, of innovation and private conviction, as well as of increased racial conflict and a widening of the chasm between rich and poor.

One of the Industrial Age’s earliest technical wonders was the Water Works, which harnessed the...

When the gilt cross went up atop the new steeple at St. Peter’s in 1842, it was a first for an Episcopal church in the United States and represented a fairly significant change from the parish’s eighteenth-century origins. In fact, the cross was approved only when the rector, Dr. William Odenheimer, cast the deciding vote in the vestry.

Odenheimer was a “Tractarian,” a member of an Anglican movement that had begun in England but quickly spread to the United States and is today known chiefly as the Oxford movement. Its core belief—that the Anglican Church, with Roman Catholicism and...

By the mid-1800s Philadelphia’s long history of commerce and industry had created intricate personal and professional ties to the Southern states.

Marriages between Philadelphians, Virginians, and Carolinians created extended families in North and South. The city’s textile mills depended on Southern cotton, which was shipped north, woven into “cottonade” (an exceptionally sturdy fabric), and resold to slave owners; calico printed in the city’s Northern Liberties neighborhood was shipped to Africa, sailed up the River Niger, and traded for boatloads of slaves. Philadelphia’s refineries required sugar from the South. For these reasons and more, abolitionist credos terrified relatives and business partners...

What had been cow pastures and ponds in the middle of the eighteenth century was, by the middle of the nineteenth, a crowded and gritty commercial and industrial neighborhood. In twenty-first-century terms, the area that St. Peter’s served—Society Hill and Queen Village—was also demographically “diverse,” and uncomfortably so. Germans, Irish, Jews, African Americans, and descendants of the original Swedish and English settlers, all working class and poor, lived on top of one another. Pitched battles among ethnic groups and between whites and blacks were common. Gangs of thugs roamed poorly lighted streets night and day. Saloons and gambling...

Although the parish’s missionary work would become most visible in programs at St. Peter’s House after the Civil War, outreach actually began in the early part of the nineteenth century under Bishop William White.

White first focused those efforts on nearby working-class neighborhoods in Northern Liberties and Southwark, where he sent his assistants to establish Sunday schools and churches. The bishop told the Reverend Jackson Kemper, one of those assistants, that while “our own immense country was our proper field” for finding new members, Episcopal missionaries should tread carefully so as not to step on the toes of other denominations....

During the late 1980s, while I was working on the manuscript that becameFrank Furness: The Complete Works,I usually spent Sunday mornings in a box pew on the north side of St. Peter’s Church while my daughter Kate sang in Tom Whittemore’s choir. The service offered a respite from the mash of too many events scheduled in too few hours and provided an opportunity to reflect and think, particularly during the sermons. Having come from three generations of ministers, I knew the agony and effort that a weekly sermon required—but I also felt I had done my part...

The years 1903 to 1907 were a time of great unrest in Russia. Nicholas II’s incompetence, coupled with high taxation and a humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, led to the first Russian Revolution in 1905 and to a few short-lived reforms. The period proved even more disastrous for the empire’s Jews. With 284 pogroms and more than 50,000 casualties, Russian Jews were looking for a way out, and that meant emigration.

It was the worst time in Russia for the Jews, but not the first time they felt the need to emigrate. Between 1881 and 1914, some 50,000 or...

Edward Miller Jefferys’s first years as St. Peter’s rector were ones of steady growth in membership, income, and outreach to the neighborhood. This initial success was probably gratifying to Jefferys, who had not been the vestry’s first choice to succeed Richard H. Nelson when the latter was called as bishop coadjutor of Albany in 1904. The vestry had wanted Thomas F. Davies Jr., the son of the former rector, but he turned the vestry down, after which the job remained vacant for almost two years.

Nelson had left the church in remarkably good condition, but twenty-four months under the part-time...

From St. Peter’s earliest days, a choir has been an essential part of the church’s cultural and religious life. In the nineteenth century, the parish also instituted formal education. With the creation of St. Peter’s Choir School for Boys in 1903, music and schooling became intricately intertwined, and remained that way for close to six decades, giving the parish a national renown that helped sustain it in some of its toughest years.

The records show that a choir sang at the first service and that a year later, the congregation was led in singing by a clerk (a prestigious position...

Today St. Peter’s Choir continues the strong tradition of Anglican choral music, but it required significant rebuilding in the wake of choirmaster Gilbert’s departure in 1960. First, Joseph Parsells was hired as organist/choirmaster. In 1963, Albert Robinson took over and kept the choir going until he retired in 1971. He was succeeded by Charles Callahan, then a young graduate of the Curtis Institute, who breathed fresh air into the program from 1971 to 1976.

(Callahan is now director of the Vermont Conservatory of Music.) Anthony Ciucci, currently the music director and organist at the Church of the Good Shepherd in...

In the years shortly before and after St. Peter’s 200th anniversary in 1961, the clergy and parishioners of the church began the process that has resulted in its transformation from a parish whose survival was in jeopardy to the healthy community that exists today—one with leaders willing to take risks and members who welcome diversity.

There are two parts to the picture of St. Peter’s at that time, as presented by the records. The first, seen through the vestry minutes, details a parish facing declining membership, financial instability, and vandalism. The second, drawn from the pew and parish bulletins,...

West of Second Street in Philadelphia, between Catharine and Queen Streets, is a stretch of green space called Mario Lanza Park. It hasn’t always been a park. From 1822 to 1908, the space was occupied by Trinity Episcopal Church, Southwark. For years, a large congregation of prosperous neighborhood residents gathered each Sunday to worship in the simple brick building that was enhanced at great expense by the architect Thomas U. Walter in the 1840s, about the time he was hired to work on St. Peter’s Church.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Trinity Church was nearing the end of...

Sally Lou Buell, a longtime St. Peter’s parishioner, was present during the transformative years when the church was struggling to redefine its mission and address the issues of social injustice in the community. She and her husband, Duncan, were a young couple committed to improving the urban environment. At the time, St. Peter’s interior was dark and gloomy. Memorial windows on the lower level kept light to a minimum. The gallery windows were covered with shades that had been installed during the Victorian era. Bars extended across the lower windows’ exteriors adding to the shuttered, forbidding atmosphere.

Sal, ever intrepid,...

The celebration of St. Peter’s 250th anniversary began in September 2008 with an Evensong to commemorate the laying of the cornerstone in 1758, and will continue through 2011 to mark the 250th year since the church opened its doors. In May 2009 actor Sam Waterston read from the pulpit stories about the church history as part of a grand evening that included a reception beforehand in the middle of Pine Street and a supper afterward for benefactors at the nearby Samuel Powel House.

Proceeds from this event, and a grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, provided...

“Peter” means rock, of course, but the land that the Penn family donated in 1757 for Philadelphia’s second Anglican church was originally swampy, with a duck pond that drained into the Delaware River via a tributary of Dock Creek. At first the yard was surrounded by a wooden fence so nearby residents could pasture their cows there. The present brick wall was erected in 1784, after the British soldiers used the fence for firewood during their occupation of Philadelphia in 1777–1778.

The churchyard is remarkably large, because the original building committee took note of a problem that Christ Church...

On a Wednesday evening in April 1862, a figure dressed in black was observed walking slowly along the brick top of St. Peter’s tower. ThePhiladelphia Inquirerreported on April 4, two days after the event, that “a large crowd soon gathered, expecting the individual to fall every moment.” As noted in the article, “Notwithstanding the great excitement in the street, the figure continued his lonely walk, apparently unconscious of what was going on below.”

The newspaper reported that the more conservative viewers thought it was probably the bell ringer or even a prankish child. “But,” the article continued, “further...

There have been twenty rectors of St. Peter’s Church since September 4, 1761. Eight were native Philadelphians. Five were sons of priests. Two had brothers who were priests. William White served the longest, at fifty-seven years. William H. Vibbert served the shortest term, slightly more than a year. Five rectors served in the military, three as chaplains, and three participated in the Battle of Okinawa.

Son of an Irish archdeacon, Jenney received his B.A. from Trinity College, Dublin, and was a Royal Navy chaplain from 1710 to 1714. Licensed as a catechist by the bishop of London in 1714, he...

There is a good chance that William White would not recognize St. Peter’s immediately if he came face to face with it today. When the saintly bishop died on July 17, 1836, what he called his “other church,” in contrast to Christ Church, had no tower and no spire crowned with a gilt cross. The tower, spire, and cross came in 1842. While the first two appear to have been part of a successful effort to save the Georgian building from being razed and replaced by a Gothic structure, placing a cross on the steeple of an Episcopal church was...