- Leighton Parks rejected a call from a Brooklyn parish. The Vestry quickly began work on a larger church, which would add forty pews.
- The Ascension Chapter (#1407) of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew was organized by the Rev. Edward Atkinson.
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Harriet Dexter Lawrence Hemenway, 1890, by John Singer Sargent. Credit: WikiCommons
Harriet Lawrence Hemenway and her cousin Minna B. Hall founded the Mass. Audubon Society. For some time they had fought against the slaughter of egrets and other birds for their plumes by organizing women to stop wearing feathered hats.
Monthly Archives: February 2013
1895
The Rev. James Yeames, Superintendent of the newly-established Emmanuel House, reported in the Year Book of Emmanuel Parish that two rooms and a hallway were combined to create a meeting space for about a hundred people on the first floor. Its treasurer Walter Baylies reported that $1778 covered the expenses for its first year.
June 16. The first service of Evening Prayer with hymns was held there and weekly thereafter. Throughout the next two months, a Summer Play School was held by the Episcopal City Mission for about a hundred boys & girls.
September. A Boys Club of about sixty members began meeting on Tuesday evenings. A Children’s House was held on Fridays at 6:30.
1894
August 15. Architect and vestryman Arthur Rotch died of pleurisy at the age of 44. In 1892, he had moved to 82 Commonwealth Avenue with his bride Lisette DeWolf Colt. Son of Benjamin and Annie Rotch, founding members of Emmanuel, Arthur had graduated from Harvard College in 1871, studied architecture at MIT in 1872-3, and then gone to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1880, he joined George Tilden in designing houses at 197, 211, 215, 231 & 233 Commonwealth Avenue, among others. In 1886, with associate Ralph Adams Cram, they built Church of the Holy Spirit, Mattapan. In 1889, they designed a mission chapel for Emmanuel, which was never realized.
In 1886, Arthur became a member of the Corporation of MIT and served as chairman of its Department of Architecture until his death. Having with his sisters established in 1883 the Rotch Traveling Scholarship in memory of their father, he bequeathed funds for the Rotch Library at MIT. He was chairman of Harvard’s Visiting Committee of Fine Arts, founder of the Boston Architectural Club, trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, and trustee and benefactor of the Mass. Eye & Ear Infirmary. Our Rotch Reredos was given by his sister Aimee Sargent in memory of him, their sister Edith. and their parents.
Houses at 231 & 233 Commonwealth Ave.
215 Commonwealth Ave.
See also
- 1886 for Church of the Holy Spirit, Mattapan, which he designed.
- Wikipedia’s entry for Arthur & for a list of their works Rotch & Tilden
- Back Bay Houses for their works in the Back Bay
- Bainbridge Bunting‘s Houses of Boston’s Back Bay (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1967) discusses several of their works in depth.
- A Continental Eye: The Art and Architecture of Arthur Rotch: the Catalogue of an Exhibition Held at the Boston Athenæum, December 10th, 1985, through January 24th, 1986, and at the Klimann Gallery of the MIT Museum, February 10th through April 5th, 1986, by Harry L. Katz and Richard Chafee.
211 Commonwealth Ave., Boston
1893
Anne Bigelow Lawrence Rotch. Portrait by Chester Harding in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Anne Bigelow Lawrence Rotch died. The daughter of Katherine Bigelow and Abbott Lawrence, Annie had married Benjamin S. Rotch in 1846 . Their daughter Aimee (Mrs. Winthrop Henry) Sargent gave our sanctuary’s Rotch reredos in memory of her, her husband, and two of their children, Arthur & Edith. They are buried in a family plot (#3004) on Bellwort Path, Mt. Auburn Cemetery.
Another son, Abbott Lawrence Rotch (1861-1912) married Margaret Randolph Anderson (1866-1912). A meterologist and astronomer, he served as our junior warden (1904-1906).
Jr. Warden Abbott Lawrence Rotch. Credit: Wikicommons
John Singer Sargent. 1903 portrait of Margaret R.A. (Mrs. Abbott Lawrence) Rotch.
Thanks to Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
1892
Rector Leighton Parks reported in the Year-Book of Emmanuel Parish that the number of communicants had grown during his tenure of fourteen years from 210 to 500. He expected the Sunday school, which had 75 children when he arrived, to reach 300 children by the year’s end. Expressing concern for expansion of the church’s facilities to accommodate this growth, he had asked the Vestry to investigate buying land west of the City for a new church.
Our mission Church of the Ascension’s yellow-brick Gothic Revival building was completed at 1906 Washington St. Parishioner Francis Richmond Allen, who may have worked as architect from its inception, would direct in 1901 structural improvements and an enlargement of its parish house. On the National Register of Historic Places, it now houses the Grant African Methodist Episcopal Church. The Rev Carlton Putnam Mills served as Minister in Charge.
Church of the Ascension, 1906 Washington St., South End, is now the Grant AME Church.
1891
Augustus St. Gaudens’ bronze of Jesus blessing Phillips Brooks was installed on Boylston St. in 1910.
14 Oct. Our second rector, the Rev. Dr. Alexander Hamilton Vinton, preached at the installation of the Rev. Dr. Phillips Brooks at Trinity Church, which had been recently constructed by H. H. Richardson under his direction in nearby Copley Square. Vinton was a mentor of Brooks, whose prayer our rector, the Rev. Pamela Werntz, prays (in modified form) at the start of her sermons: O God, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
Later in the year Brooks was elected Bishop of Massachusetts.
1890
Feb. 8. Under the direction of the Rev. Walter E. Smith, Chapel of the Ascension moved to its new home at 1906 Washington St.. At that time its Sunday School had 15 teachers and 200 registered students, and there were 175 congregants. The church was consecrated by Bishop H. Paddock as Church of the Ascension. Our founding rector F.D. Huntington, by then Bishop of Central New York, returned to preach the inaugural sermon. He praised Emmanuel for funding the building and developing the programs of this mission : “A true parish is one which is always working for others. The missionary spirit may be called the first distinguishing mark of this congregation.” —Emmanuel Church: The First 100 Years, p. 21.
1889
1888
- 17 November. Walter Cabot Baylies, Harvard Class of 1884, who became senior warden in 1907, married Charlotte (Lottie) Upham of 122 Beacon St., daughter of Emmanuel founder George Phineas and Sarah Sprague Upham. The Rev. Dr. Leighton Parks presided at what the Boston Globe called a “brilliant Saturday wedding”, which filled the church with a “large and distinctly fashionable audience.”
1887
Dr. Richard Manning Hodges and his wife Frances Gardner White (first cousin of parishioner John Lowell (Jack) Gardner, Jr.) moved into their house @ 408 Beacon St., which was designed by parishioner Francis Richmond Allen. Dr. Hodges, who had served on our vestry 1874-75, published in 1891 his account of the first use of ether for surgical anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The door from our sanctuary to the sacristy is dedicated to his memory.