Timeline of History at Emmanuel

We’re interested to learn of significant dates and events involving Emmanuelites past and present. Please email archivist@emmanuelboston.org about the details of your Emmanuel timeline. To jump back by decades in this chronology, please select one of these years, and then move up or down by years:

1865 | 1875 | 1885 | 1895 | 1905 | 1915 | 1925 | 1935 | 1945 |

1955 | 1965 | 1975 | 1985 | 1995 | 2005 | 2015 | 2020 | History page.

1897

Posted on by

October 28. Rector Leighton Parks set up the Emmanuel Club to give young men of the parish a venue for fellowship.  Samuel Taylor was its first secretary.  They met several times a year for dinner with speakers or entertainment at the newly formed University Club at 270 Beacon Street.   Fitz-Henry Smith Jr. was secretary during its last year in 1911.  A member of the Harvard College Class of 1896, he went on to write these works about Boston:

  • The story of Boston light, with some account of the beacons in Boston harbor (1911).
  • The French at Boston during the Revolution : with particular reference to the French fleets and the fortifications in the harbor (1913).
  • Storms and shipwrecks in Boston and the record of the life savers of Hull (1918).

November.  The Rev. Henrietta Rue Goodwin began her service as deaconess at Emmanuel, which included distributing clothing, monitoring the Mothers’ Meeting, helping to fund choir vestments, and overseeing a Bible class and the Students’ Club.  Her reports in our Yearbooks (1897-1906), give her accounting of Special Funds for distribution of aid to the poor and her other activities, which included thousands of visits to the sick and needy.

Children of Anne & Benjamin Rotch (clockwise): Aimee, Edith, Arthur & Lawrence

Work of Emmanuel House in the South End was transferred to our mission there, Church of the Ascension.

Edith Rotch, the younger daughter of Anne Bigelow Lawrence & Benjamin S. Rotch died at the age of fifty.  She was memorialized by her sister Aimee R. Sargent in our Rotch reredos.

1896

Posted on by
  • Leighton Parks rejected a call from a Brooklyn parish.  The Vestry quickly began work on a larger church, which would add forty pews.
  • The Ascension Chapter (#1407) of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew was organized by the Rev. Edward Atkinson.

  • Harriet Dexter Lawrence Hemenway, 1890, by John Singer Sargent. Credit: WikiCommons

    Harriet Lawrence Hemenway and her cousin Minna B. Hall founded the Mass. Audubon Society.  For some time they had fought against the slaughter of egrets and other birds for their plumes by organizing women to stop wearing feathered hats.

1895

Posted on by

The Rev. James Yeames, Superintendent of the newly-established Emmanuel House, reported in the Year Book of Emmanuel Parish that two rooms and a hallway were combined to create a meeting space for about a hundred people on the first floor.  Its treasurer Walter Baylies reported that $1778 covered the expenses for its first year.

June 16.  The first service of Evening Prayer with hymns was held there and weekly thereafter.  Throughout the next two months, a Summer Play School was held by the Episcopal City Mission for about a hundred boys & girls.

September. A Boys Club of about sixty members began meeting on Tuesday evenings.  A Children’s House was held on Fridays at 6:30.

 

1894

Posted on by

August 15.  Architect and vestryman Arthur Rotch died of pleurisy at the age of 44.  In 1892, he had moved to 82 Commonwealth Avenue with his bride Lisette DeWolf Colt.  Son of Benjamin and Annie Rotch, founding members of   Emmanuel, Arthur had graduated from Harvard College in 1871, studied architecture at MIT in 1872-3, and then gone to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  In 1880, he joined George Tilden in designing houses at 197, 211, 215, 231 & 233 Commonwealth Avenue, among others.  In 1886, with associate Ralph Adams Cram, they built Church of the Holy Spirit, Mattapan.  In 1889, they designed a mission chapel for Emmanuel, which was never realized.

In 1886, Arthur became a member of the Corporation of MIT and served as chairman of its Department of Architecture until his death. Having with his sisters established in 1883 the Rotch Traveling Scholarship in memory of their father, he bequeathed funds for the Rotch Library at MIT.  He was chairman of Harvard’s Visiting Committee of Fine Arts, founder of the Boston Architectural Club, trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, and trustee and benefactor of the Mass. Eye & Ear Infirmary.  Our Rotch Reredos was given by his sister Aimee Sargent in memory of him, their sister Edith. and their parents.

Houses at 231 & 233 Commonwealth Ave.

 

215 Commonwealth Ave.

See also

  • Wikipedia’s entry for Arthur  & for a list of their works Rotch & Tilden
  • Back Bay Houses for their works in the Back Bay
  • Bainbridge Bunting‘s Houses of Boston’s Back Bay (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1967) discusses several of their works in depth.
  • A Continental Eye: The Art and Architecture of Arthur Rotch: the Catalogue of an Exhibition Held at the Boston Athenæum, December 10th, 1985, through January 24th, 1986, and at the Klimann Gallery of the MIT Museum, February 10th through April 5th, 1986, by  Harry L. Katz and Richard Chafee.

    211 Commonwealth Ave., Boston

 

1893

Posted on by

Anne Bigelow Lawrence Rotch. Portrait by Chester Harding in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Anne Bigelow Lawrence Rotch died. The daughter of Katherine Bigelow and Abbott Lawrence, Annie had married Benjamin S. Rotch in 1846 . Their daughter Aimee (Mrs. Winthrop Henry) Sargent gave our sanctuary’s Rotch reredos in memory of her, her husband, and two of their children, Arthur & Edith. They are buried in a family plot (#3004) on Bellwort Path, Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

1892

Posted on by

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.

1891

Posted on by
bronze statue of Brooks outside Trinity Church

Augustus St. Gaudens’ bronze of Jesus blessing Phillips Brooks was installed on Boylston St. in 1910.

14 Oct.  Our second rector, the Rev. Dr. Alexander Hamilton Vinton, preached at the installation of the Rev. Dr. Phillips Brooks at Trinity Church, which had been recently constructed under his direction in nearby Copley Square.  Vinton was a mentor of Brooks, whose prayer our rector, the Rev. Pamela Werntz,  prays (in modified form) at the start of her sermons:  O God, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Later in the year Brooks was elected Bishop of Massachusetts.

1890

Posted on by

February 8.  Chapel of the Ascension was consecrated by Bishop Benjamin H. Paddock, D.D..  Our founding rector then Bishop of Central New York,  F. Dan Huntington, D.D. preached to a packed congregation at 1906 Washington Street.  Our mission church was supported by many gifts of Emmanuel’s parishioners including a Tiffany window (Mrs. Heath), Communion table (in memory of Jonathan French), pulpit (Mrs. Luther Farnham), oak eagle lectern (Misses Waters), and organ (Edith Rotch).

1888

Posted on by
  • 17 November.  Walter Cabot Baylies, Harvard Class of 1884, who became senior warden in 1907, married Charlotte (Lottie) Upham of 122 Beacon St., daughter of Emmanuel founder George Phineas and Sarah Sprague Upham. The Rev. Dr. Leighton Parks presided at what the Boston Globe called a “brilliant Saturday wedding”, which filled the church with a “large and distinctly fashionable audience.”