Monthly Archives: February 2013

1872

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  • Consuming 65 acres downtown, the Great Boston Fire killed 12 firefighters and several dozen residents. On Summer Street it destroyed Trinity Church, which the congregation rebuilt 5 years later on Copley Square, several blocks from Emmanuel. Above is John Adams Whipple‘s panorama of the damage looking east from Washington St. at Bromfield Street.

  • Eben Dyer Jordan (1822-95). Credit: WikiCommons

    Parishioner and founder of Jordan Marsh Co., Eben Dyer Marsh and five others founded the Boston Globe.  See also this 1890 biographical sketch by John C. Rand.

1871

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Benjamin Smith Rotch (1817-1882) began a three-year term on the vestry with Rector Alexander Hamilton Vinton. The  reredos  in  our  Sanctuary was given in memory of him, his wife Annie Bigelow Lawrence, and two of their children.

Thanks to Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for this cameo of a younger Benj. S. Rotch.

1869

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  • 27 December.  Caroline Maria (née Welch) Crowninshield at the age of 45 married at Emmanuel Howard Payson Arnold, a 39-year-old attorney from Cambridge MA. They came to reside nearby at 156 Beacon Street. See also her memorial window.
  • 31 March. Dr. Huntington left to become the first bishop of Central New York.
  • The Rev. Dr. Alexander Hamilton Vinton (1807-1881) became our second rector.timeLineahvintonHead1

For biographical information on Dr. Vinton please see the chapter on him in Emmanuel Church, 1860-1960: The First Hundred Years.

See also Timeline 1894.

1868

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This snapshot of a postwar vestry includes prominent Bostonians.

E.R. Mudge (1812-1881)

E.P. Dutton (1831-1923) Credit: WikiCommons

  • Sr. Warden:  Benjamin

    Geo. P. Denny (1826-85)

    Tyler Reed, Jr. (1864-72)

  • Jr. Warden:  Enoch Redington Mudge, (1865-72)
  • Treasurer: George Parkman Denny (1865-72)
  • Clerk: Robert Codman, Sr. (1865-70); father of Robert. Codman, Bishop of Maine
  • Vestrymen
    • Samuel Turner Dana (1868-71); merchant
    • E.P. Dutton (1862-63,1868-69); publisher
    • Jonathan French (1863-74)
    • Horace Gray, Jr. (1868-69), judge

      Horace Gray, Jr., Associate (1864-73) & Chief (1873-82) of the Mass. Supreme Judicial Court; U.S. Supreme Court Justice (1882-1902). Credit: WikiCommons

    • S.J.M. Homer (1868-71); hardware merchant
    • B.F. Nourse (1865-68); author (with Mudge) of a report on cotton cultivation for the Paris International Exhibition
    • Thomas D. Townsend (1865-70)

1867

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Parishioner Benjamin Tyler Reed gave $100,000 for the establishment of a school of theology in Cambridge MA, which was incorporated as the Episcopal Theological School.  For its 50th anniversary in July 1917, John H. Wilson wrote a brief history on p. 4 of The Witness, which listed among its first board of trustees Emmanuelite Edward Sprague Rand.  Early trustees affiliated with Emmanuel included Gov. Alexander H. Rice, Clement Fay, and John H. Burnham.

See also 2021.

photo credit: WikiCommons

E.S. Rand Jr., Harvard College Class of 1855

C.K. Fay (1845-98)

Gov. A.H. Rice

1866

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Enoch Redington Mudge

Chapel of the Good Shepherd was consecrated as an independent corporation, the Free Church of the Good Shepherd at 8 Cortes St. in the South End. The mission had begun in 1862 with a Sunday school, which was held in rooms over a carpenter’s shop on Church St. in Bay Village.  Among its Emmanuelite founders were the Rev. William R. Huntington, warden John Davis Williams French, and Enoch R. Mudge.

See also:   1880

1865

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Having been denied church funding,  Rector Dan Huntington raised funds from parishioners, including the French family, to pay for Chapel of the Good Shepherd, which was consecrated.

  • April 9.  Surrender at Appomattox VA ends the Civil War.
  • April 14.  President Abraham Lincoln was assisinated.
  • Dec. 6. Congress ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which ended slavery in the US.

1864

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The Rev. Mary Douglass Burnham, 1899, by permission of SUNY Upstate Medical University

Having learned of a recent massacre of Sioux Indians from her friend Evelina Bogart of Albany NY,  parishioner Mary Douglass Saville (Mrs. Wesley) Burnham (1832-1904) founded the Dakota League,  a mission of our diocese (and eventually other Boston-area churches) to support Native Americans in the Dakota Territory.

Isabella Gardner

Isabella Stewart Gardner by John Singer Sargent, courtesy of the Gardner Museum via WikiCommons

April 10.Isabella Stewart Gardner was confirmed at Emmanuel by the Rt. Rev. Dr. Manton Eastburn, Bishop of Massachusetts.  It was the fourth anniversary of her marriage to John Lowell Gardner, Jr., who had purchased Pew 28  in 1862.  Although the Stewarts had been members of Grace Church in New York City, their children were not confirmed until they reached adulthood. Louise Hall Tharp in her biography Mrs. Jack hypothesizes that Isabella’s confirmation “might have been a sort of thank-offering for the child she so much wanted”.  John Lowell 3rd, born on June 18, 1863, unfortunately died on March 15, 1865. His baptism and burial are recorded in our parish register. The Gardners, who lived nearby at 152 Beacon St., later raised their orphaned nephews, sons of Jack’s brother Joseph, also owned a pew until his death in 1875.

Take a visual tour of her museum and its collection at Google’s Cultural Institute.