Tag Archives: Boston

1892

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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.

1887

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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.

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.

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)

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.