Our Founding Rector

Frederic Dan Huntington, D.D.

At the beginning of the Civil War our founders called to be our first rector Harvard’s Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, an abolitionist and former Unitarian, who was to become The Rt. Rev. Dr. Frederic Dan Huntington. Before he became Senior Warden in 2004, Michael Shea was commissioned to write something about our early days.  Intrigued by Dr. Huntington’s life, he began to research what became  Emmanuel Church’s First Rector:  Frederic Dan Huntington (1819–1904). Shea summarizes his story of Dr. Huntington’s spiritual journey in this way:

Huntington’s father and mother became Unitarians and were brutally expelled from their Hadley Congregational parish. He became the preeminent Unitarian preacher in Boston and then Harvard’s first (non-denominational) chaplain, but resigned to become an Episcopalian. Called as Emmanuel’s first rector while still a deacon, he made it into a beehive of religious outreach and community service.  He turned down election as bishop of Maine, but after seven years accepted election as bishop of the new diocese of Central New York in Syracuse, where he was widely admired and spent 35 years as an advocate of social justice. His life is well-documented, and [my initial] handout grew into [this] extensive booklet on his fascinating life.

Our rector Pam Werntz has referred to Huntington in many of her sermons, which can be retrieved  by searching huntington in our upper-right search box.  In her 2015 sermon for Trinity Sunday, she speculated:

 I don’t think it was the doctrine of the Trinity that called to him as much as his love of liturgy – and the hymns, no doubt. I like to say that Emmanuel Church has been Episcotarian ever since.

For more about our famous founding father, please see:

  1. Clergy Views on Slavery
  2. Land Use Acknowledgement, which mentions the Huntington family’s holding slaves on their farm in Hadley MA.
  3. Robeson, Harriet Allen. Chapter on him in our centennial history
  4. History:  Our Foundation
  5. Our Composers
  6. Description of his bust in our Sanctuary
  7. Timeline of Emmanuel History’s entries for him: 1860, 1861 & 1869
  8. Our Parish Historian (email:  archivist@EmmanuelBoston.org for access to his sermons & other archival material)
  9. Huntington, Arria Sargent.  Memoir & Letters of F.D. Huntington
  10. Wikipedia’s page Frederic Dan Huntington
  11. An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church:  FDH