Chapter One: Foundation (1848-1853)

Our Founder.

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taten Island seemed very far away from New York City: it was a resort island, where grand families from the City had summer homes; it was an island of fishing villages and mills and dairy farms; some of it was still virtual wilderness.

The year was 1848. Our story begins with Dr. Samuel MacKenzie Elliott, a kindly Scot of Inverness, who had migrated in 1833 and soon become a famous, wealthy and eccentric eye-surgeon, credited with inventing the surgical removal of cataracts. He would operate with his patient lying on the floor, the patient’s head grasped between his own knees. Elliott had a weakness for folk remedies, and was always happy to experiment, so that he was sometimes in ill odor with New York’s medical establishment. But his reputation survived these shocks, and a literary colony gathered around his Staten Island home: Henry Longfellow, Francis Parkman, James Russell Lowell and others would make the long journey out from the city to enjoy his hospitality.

Visitors to the Founder: Longfellow, Lowell, Parkman

When the Civil War began, Elliott joined the 79th Regiment of New York Volunteers as a lieutenant colonel; he fell under his horse at First Bull Run, and his injuries ended his personal military service.

First Bull Run, July 21, 1861

But he raised a brigade for the 79th Highlanders, at his own expenses (advertising for “red-headed Macs with a bad temper”), and ended the war as a brigadier general.

Officers of the 79th Highlanders during the Civil War

When he died in 1875 The New York Tribune eulogised him as “emphatically one of the men who impart the element of the picturesque to common affairs”.

Elliott lived in what was then called Factoryville, and is now West New Brighton. Indeed, he had a project for founding a new “pastoral suburb” further west along the Kill van Kull, a suburb to be called Elliottville, for which he built some fifteen houses (two are still standing, at 69 Delafield Place and 557 Bard Avenue). In due course – in 1848, indeed – Elliott decided that Elliotville needed an Episcopalian Church; and with this whim our history begins.

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nglicanism had arrived in Staten Island soon after the British took it from the Dutch in 1674, and Parliament voted £40 a year for a resident priest. When the Thirteen Colonies revolted, the American branch of the Church of England became the American Episcopal Church. In 1848 it still boasted only a few parishes on Staten Island (St Andrew’s, dating from 1713, Ascension, from 1802, St John’s, from 1844, St Paul’s from 1833). Elliott, a member of the Episcopalian Church of Scotland, wanted more. He therefore erected and furnished a chapel on his own land. A large white house now stands on the spot: the northwest corner of the intersection of Delafield Place and Bard Avenue, a few blocks south of the Kill van Kull, within sight of the water. This little frame gothic chapel, “neat and very tasteful”, with twenty pews that would “comfortably seat one hundred and fifty persons”, was named in honour of St Mary, the Mother of God. Our Founder provided St Mary’s with a silver service for celebrating Mass, and with a barrel organ, with the mechanical music necessary for Episcopalian services (both silver and organ have since vanished, alas). On 1 October, 1848, the first service in the new church was celebrated by the Rev’d Gordon Winslow, rector of St Paul’s, Stapleton; and the round of worship and rejoicing there has never ceased.

St. Mary’s Church was duly incorporated as a parish on August 17th, 1849, and the Rev’d Henry B. Bartow, assistant to the Rector of the fashionable Manhattan parish of St. George’s, Stuyvesant Square, was called to be first Rector. Among those on the first Vestry were such familiar Staten Island names as William Bard, Edward Bement, Nathan Barrett and Rufus King Delafield.

On January 7th, 1851, Bartow was succeeded by the Rev’d Samuel P. Parker. Already a larger and more permanent structure was needed. An acre of land was deeded to the parish by William Bard and his wife Catharine, well to the south of the original site, on the corner of Castleton and Davis Avenues. This grant pretty much constitutes the area of the present churchyard (in 1924 the parish was to buy land east of the church “to protect the Altar from secular encroachments”), St Mary’s has never had to move again: we remain on the land made our heritage by the Bards.

Money was quickly raised for building: Catharine Bard gave $500, William Bard’s brother John $3000, Trinity Church, Wall Street (already a very wealthy parish) $1000, various members of the congregation another $3000; a $5000 loan was raised in New York. The rest of the money ($10,700) came from the sale of pews, which is to say that local families paid from $100 to $300 each for the right to occupy particular pews as their own. These were huge sums: the parish was then paying its sexton $50 a year, and even by the 1870s St Mary’s annual income was only $1544!

A textbook illustration of an Early English window: twin lancets with ‘plate’ tracery – very like St Mary’s design

The new church was built on the Bards’ land, using the local black stone, was in the ‘Early English’ Gothic (or ‘Lancet’ or ‘First Pounted’) style, then immensely fashionable. Early English architecture first flourished between about 1180 and 1275; it employed arches that came up to a point, thin lancet windows, and four-fold ribbed vaults. It was a simple, almost austere manner, aiming at fine proportion rather than elaborate decoration. In the mid-nineteenth century the style was revived; Frank Wills, of the firm Wills & Dudley, was the official architect of the New York Ecclesiological Society, which promoted the Early English architectural movement; and here at St Mary’s, Castleton, Wills built a masterpiece.

Wills’ church (which ended where at the present crossing, where there is now the rood screen, and did not include the present porch) was begun on June 21st, 1852, and consecrated on May 26th, 1853 by the Rt. Rev’d Jonathan M. Wainwright, provisional Bishop of New York (and ancestor of General Wainwright of Bataan). “I do hereby pronounce that the said St Mary’s Church is consecrated”, declared the bishop, “and thereby separated henceforth from all unhallowed, worldly and common uses, and dedicated to the worship and service of Almighty God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost . . . .” The Vestry added that “any member of the Congregation [shall] have liberty to erect a horse shed on the north side of the Church.”

Not long afterward, the original St Mary’s, the little wooden chapel, burned down. No sketch or photograph of it exists, which is a shame.