Tag Archives: Harvard

2023

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1 Feb.  The US Mint announced that The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray and four other women will be honored on quarters next year as part of its American Women Quarters series, celebrating the contributions of women to American history.

Peter & Margaret Johnson

5 Feb. At our annual meeting, Peter Johnson and Elizabeth Richardson retired from our vestry. He or his wife Margaret had served continuously since 1985, and Elizabeth for twenty. Peter was senior warden for two rectors:  William Blaine-Wallace and Pamela Werntz.  He was project manager for renovations of our back wall (see image above) and facade.  While becoming a Master Gardener in 2018, he assumed responsibility for our garden and continues to serve on our Building Commission.  Elizabeth, who served as a vestry member, clerk of the vestry, and junior warden, continues to serve on our Communications Commission and History & Archives Commission.

9 July.We celebrated the feast of our own saint, Pauli Murray.  Our rector preached about Murray’s ordination and significance for The Episcopal Church and justice in the United States. Murray’s niece Rosita Stevens-Holsey spoke after the service and signed copies of her book Pauli Murray: The Life of a Pioneering Feminist and Civil Rights Activist.  A statue of Murray sculpted by Artist-in-Residence Ted Southwick was installed in a niche on our Sanctuary pulpit.

July 30.  Clerk of the Vestry Mary Beth Clack, Cindy Coldren, and Pat Krol reported on a Chapel Camp session devoted to repairing the breach of racial injustice in what became the  blog of their Racial Justice Working Group, We’ve Come This Far by Faith.

September. The Rev. Dr. Martha Tucker joined us as Interim Priest while our rector began her 3-month sabbatical.

The late Walter Jonas chatted with his friend Philip Henry weekly in our Parish Hall.

Nov. 10.  Walter Jonas, chair of our Care Commission, died at the age of eighty.  After earning a masters degree from Harvard Divinity School (HDS), he had been ordained a Unitarian Universalist (UU) minister and served two churches. He came here for our music and stayed to become a beloved parishioner.  During the Covid pandemic he was a founding advocate for the Emmanuel Center’s  Zoom groups for studying biblical languages.  He joined its Latin group, which was led by the Rev. Susan Ackley and her son Andy Cabell, with the help of another masters student at HDS, Carolyn Beard. He brought its current leader Peter Bonis, whom he knew at the First Church (UU).

December 1. On Rosemary Harbison‘s birthday we celebrated John Harbison’s 85th birthday (Dec. 20) with dinner and music in the Parish Hall.

1954

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Emma Louise Gildersleeve Lane died.  Born in 1872 in Charlottesville, Virginia, to Emma Louisa Lanneau and Professor Basil Gildersleeve, later of Johns Hopkins University.  As founding editor of The American Journal of Philology, he became a colleague of Harvard Professor George Martin Lane, father of her husband-to-be Gardiner Martin Lane, an Emmanuelite and banker who became chairman of the board of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.  In their memory, their daughter Katharine Lane Weems gave an endowment and a pair of Spanish candelabra for our baptistry.

1914

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The Students’ House Corporation, under the direction of Mary S. Holmes and Charlotte Upham Baylies, built at 96 The Fenway a home for our Students’ House, which had been in rented quarters since its inception in 1899. They engaged architects Kilham & Hopkins, raised a large portion of its construction cost ($124K), and secured a mortgage for the remainder.  The building is now Kerr Hall, a Northeastern University dormitory.

 

 

 

October 6.  About a thousand people attended the funeral service for financier, philanthropist, and parishioner Gardiner Martin Lane (born 1859).  The Rev. Dr. Elwood Worcester, The Rt. Rev. William Lawrence,  The Rev. John W. Suter of Winchester, and The Rev. Prescott Evarts from Lane’s Harvard Class of 1881 officiated.  Pallbearers included President  A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, Charles Francis Adams, and several of his partners from Lee Higginson & Co.. Lynnwood Farnum played a Tchaikovsky funeral march and “Dead March” from Handel’s “Saul”. The boys choir sang “Abide with me” and “The strife is over”.

Gardiner Martin Lane from Harvard College Class of 1881 biography of him in the papers of Katharine Lane Weems at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe.

As treasurer of the New England chapter of the International Red Cross, Lane collected and distributed relief funds for the Salem fire (1914), the San Francisco earthquake (1906), and other disasters.  Appointed trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1906, and elected its president in 1907, he oversaw its move from Copley Square to the Evans Building on Huntington Ave., which was designed by Emmanuelite Guy Lowell.  Spearheading the Museum’s fundraising effort for the new facility, Lane said, “A mere collection of beautiful objects is of little value unless seen, appreciated, and understood by many.”

Gardiner was born in Cambridge in 1859 to Fannie Bradford and Harvard philologist George Martin Lane, who became the first Harvard professor to receive a pension. Gardiner graduated from Harvard in 1881 and married Emma Louise, a daughter of Basil L. Gildersleeve, his father’s colleague at Johns Hopkins U.. The Lanes are buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery’s Lot 1727 on Yarrow Path. His widow and daughter Katharine Lane Weems, were parishioners for years after his death and generous benefactors of Emmanuel.

See also our pages World War I Memorial and Katharine Lane Weems.

The Lanes’ home at 53 Marlborough is now the French Cultural Center.

The Lanes’ summer house, The Chimneys, in Manchester by the Sea, MA was designed by Emma G. Lane’s brother Raleigh C. Gildersleeve.