St. Paul's Episcopal Church (Baltimore, Maryland) - History

History

St. Paul's was founded in 1692 under the Establishment Act, which created 30 "Protestant" (Anglican) parishes in the colony of Maryland. The first church as "Patapsco Parish" was located somewhere along Colgate Creek, on the Patapsco Neck peninsula which juts into the Chesapeake Bay at North Point and Sparrows Point between the Patapsco River to the south and Back River (Maryland) to the north. Modern-day Highlandtown and Canton in southeastern Baltimore City and Dundalk, Edgemere, and Fort Howard are in suburban southeastern Baltimore County communities there now. When Baltimore Town was founded in its present location in 1729, the parish moved to "Lot 19," in the Original Survey" of 1730 at the highest point just inside the original town boundaries purchased from Charles Carroll of Carrollton, where a small brick church, rectory and some cemetery plots were placed in 1739 on a cliff overlooking the Jones Falls stream to the east and northwest of the original Courthouse Square (later Battle Monument Square) at North Calvert between East Lexington and Fayette Streets. The present church is located on a portion of that property.

All Episcopal parishes in Baltimore City and many in Baltimore County are in some way traced to Old St. Paul's. The first "daughter" congregation, Christ Church (closed 1986), was created in 1796 near the present day War Memorial/City Hall Plaza at the southeast corner of South Gay and East Fayette Streets. Another congregation, St. Peter's, was created in an evangelical split from Old St. Paul's in 1801 during the rectorate of Dr. Joseph Bend; that congregation is today known as Grace and St. Peter's and has, ironically, evolved into a high church Anglo-Catholic parish.

The third building erected for St. Paul's was designed by noted Baltimore architect Robert Cary Long, Jr. and constructed in 1812 (some sources say 1814-1817). This neo-classical structure seated 1,600 people in the main level and galleries and was graced with a 126 foot high spire. The three orders of Greek columns adorned the building. It was destroyed by fire in 1854; the cross that fell from that tower now adorns the old Church Home Hospital on Broadway in Baltimore. The fourth church was completed two years later.

The 1856 building reflected the growing influence of the Oxford Movement in the Episcopal Church. Richard Upjohn's design for the new building invoked not the democratic values of the Federal Period but the Catholicism of Italy, which he had recently toured. He also had just designed the famous Gothic Trinity Church on Wall Street in lower New York City Since the existing walls of St. Paul's did not allow for the pointed-gothic design preferred by the Ecclesiological Society, Upjohn patterned the building after the Basilica of San Giorgio in Rome. The side galleries so important to preaching were not rebuilt, and focus in the building was dramatically pointed to the altar with a spacious (for the time) chancel.

Thus the "high church" position that St. Paul's had occupied since the rectorate of Dr. Bend became more pronounced, especially under the rectorate of Dr. William Wyatt, who oversaw the construction of the new building and the creation of a number of Anglo-Catholic mission parishes around Baltimore City, most notably Mount Calvary Church. His successor, Rev'd. Milo Mahan, introduced candles on the altar and seasonal liturgical colors. The Rev. John Sebastian Bach Hodges, who led the parish for 35 years until 1905, replaced a paid quartet with the "Choir of Men and Boys", which still sings at the 11 a.m. Sunday service. In 2002, a Choir of Girls was created during the rectorship of Rev. David Cobb.

Two rectors of Old St. Paul's have become bishops of Episcopal Diocese of Maryland: The Right Rev. James Kemp (1764-1827) and the Right Rev. Harry Lee Doll (1903-1984).