Originally published on July 2, 2020.
The Reverend Doctor Samuel Farmar Jarvis is celebrated as “the first historiographer of the Episcopal Church,” a position to which he was named at the General Convention in 1838. He is best known to us, however, as the first Rector of St. Paul’s Church in Boston. Prior to his installation as pastor of the new church on July 7, 1820, the Rev. Jarvis was already well known to many of the church’s first subscribers. His nature as a prolific recorder of events, along with his keen attention to his reputation and legacy, left us with many clues in the church’s and other institutional archives about the early years of St. Paul’s and his tenure as Rector.
The Rev. Jarvis was born in January 1786 in Middletown, Connecticut, son of that state’s second American Episcopal Bishop Abraham Jarvis. Educated at Yale, Samuel Jarvis was ordained into the priesthood in 1811 at the age of 25. He served at St. Michael’s Church in Bloomingdale, New York, and then as Rector of St. James’ Church in New York City. It was while he was Rector at St. James’ that the Rev. Jarvis came to the attention of some of the influential proprietors of Trinity Church in Boston.
Dudley Atkins Tyng, Reporter of Decisions for the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in Boston and enthusiastic member of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, corresponded frequently with the Rev. Jarvis about their shared passions. Tyng and others at Trinity Church, then located at the corner of Summer Street and Bishop’s Way (later Hawley Street) in the South End and one of only two Episcopal (formerly Anglican) churches in Boston, sought over the summer of 1818 to force the Reverend Dr. John Gardiner, Trinity’s Rector, to take on an Associate Rector. They went so far as to fund the new position through the foundation of one of the proprietors and secure a favorable vote of the majority of Trinity’s proprietors, all over the objection of the Rev. Gardiner. Even the Rev. Asa Eaton, Rector of Christ Church in the North End (Old North Church) wrote to the Rev. Jarvis pleading with him to accept the position, while also warning him of the perilous position of the Episcopal Church in New England at that time. The Rev. Jarvis found himself en route to Boston only to be stifled by a message from Gardiner stating he did not support his hiring and dissuading him from continuing.
Tyng, later to become the first Warden of St. Paul’s, and his coconspirators did not give up. The next plan, Tyng explained in a letter to the Rev. Jarvis, was to build a new church “in the nature of a chapel of ease to Trinity Church, the pewholders of which should increase the salary of the assistant minister to a competent support, and in which the rector and assistant should officiate alternately.” Tyng’s hope was to establish the chapel and then make it an independent church once it was filled. There was not enough support among a majority of Trinity proprietors, however, to build a new church. Thereafter, the plan to build a new independent Episcopal Church in Boston, calling the Rev. Jarvis as its Rector, proceeded.
While the new church’s supporters were soliciting subscribers from among disaffected members of other Episcopal churches and the city’s Congregational churches in 1819, the Rev. Jarvis was offered a position as the professor of Biblical Learning at the newly established General Theological Seminary in New York. He informed Tyng of his decision to accept the professorship in order to help the new seminary get started, but with every intention of giving suitable notice of his departure to Boston should the new church be built. When St. Paul’s was built, and the Rev. Jarvis was invited to be its Rector, his departure from the seminary caused a permanent and public rift with the Bishop of New York, John Henry Hobart.
While serving at the seminary, the Rev. Jarvis stayed in constant contact with the subscribers of St. Paul’s and the chairman of the church’s building committee, George Sullivan, offering opinions on its location, construction and subscriptions. Most of Jarvis’ ideas were rejected or ignored, but he was finally received in Boston near the end of June 1820 and installed as Rector shortly afterwards.
In his narrative about his time at St. Paul’s published after his departure in 1826, the Rev. Jarvis lamented, “I was induced to believe that a greater field of usefulness was opened to me in Boston, than in the parishes where I had been for nine years happily settled, or in the Theological Seminary then in its infancy…on my arrival in Boston, I found myself disappointed in almost every particular.”
“Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.” Psalm 24 (KJV)
Compiled with the assistance of Myra Anderson, Vice Chair of the Cathedral Chapter.
Photos saved on Flickr.com.