Tag Archives: rectors

1929

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Upon the planned retirement of The Rev. Elwood Worcester, The Rev. Dr. Benjamin Martin Washburn became rector. For more about the Washburn tenure during the Great Depression, please see the chapter on him in Emmanuel Church, 1860-1960: The First Hundred Years.

This image of “The Emmanuelists” honors men associated with the Emmanuel Movement during Worcester’s rectorship: (top row) William James, Richard C. Cabot, Joseph Hersey Pratt, Pierre Janet & (bottow row): Lyman Pierson Powell, Samuel McComb, Elwood Worcester, Isador Coriat, and Courtenay Baylor.

1919

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  • Mary Robeson Sargent died of diabetes at the age of 66.
  • Courtenay Baylor (1870-1947) published Remaking a Man: One Successful Method of Mental Refitting (NY: Moffat, Yard), full text.  Recently helped by our fourth rector Elwood Worcester, Baylor gave up his insurance business to join the Emmanuel staff in 1912.  Under Worcester’s supervision he became a lay therapist for alcoholics.CourtneyBaylor253

In 1925 he and Worcester formed the Craigie Foundation to continue their work privately in anticipation of Worcester’s retirement from Emmanuel Church in 1929.  In his book, Baylor claimed he had success with about two thirds of a thousand patients.  Through his patients Rowland Hazard III and Richard R. Peabody he influenced William  G. Wilson, a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

For more information on Baylor’s contribution see:

  • “The Continuation of Therapy:  Courtenay Baylor and Richard R. Peabody”, pp. 35-59 in Richard M. Dubiel, The Road to Fellowship:  The Role of the Emmanuel Movement and the Jacoby Club in the Development of Alcoholics Anonymous (NY:iUniverse for the Hindsfoot Foundation, 2004).
  • “Worcester in Retirement and Successors to the Emmanuel Movement”, pp. 99-108 in Sanford Gifford, The Emmanuel Movement:  The Origins of Group Treatment and the Assault on Lay Psychotherapy (Boston: Harvard U. Press for the Francis Countway Library of Medicine, 1997).
  • “Early alcoholism treatment: the Emmanuel Movement and Richard Peabody”, K. McCarthy. Journal of Studies on Alcohol 45(1):59-74, Jan. 1984. PMID:  6366377.

1916

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  • 6 Feb. The Rev. Dr. Elwood Worcester delivered a sermon entitled “A Plan Providing for the Prosperity of Emmanuel Church”. In his appeal to increase the number of pledging parishioners from 300 to 500, he expressed confidence that the congregation would respond with faithful and systematic support for the parish.

Emmanuel stands for as much as any church I know. It was built and it has been maintained by the love and sacrifices of its people. Countless blessings have come from it to us. Some of the best things of our lives have come to us here. Some of the holiest associations hover around this building. Let us then do our part…to continue these blessings to our children.

1909

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  • Thanks to the late Craig Smith for this image of Priscilla as a girl, c1915.

    7 May.  Benefactor of our cantata program, Priscilla Rawson (Young) was born in Bayside, NYC to Clementine Herschel of Holyoke MA & Hobart Rawson of Cincinnati OH. She was named for her Mayflower ancestor Priscilla Mullins Alden, who in turn was the namesake of Priscilla, now thought to have been the amanuensis of Paul the Apostle and author of the Epistle to the Hebrews [1].  See also 1939, 1942, 1971, 1973, 1994 & 2000.

  • Elwood Worcester and Samuel McComb published The Christian Religion as a Healing Power: A Defense and Exposition of the Emmanuel Movement (NY: Moffat, Yard), full text.  It is an addendum to their Religion and Medicine:  The Moral Control of Nervous Disorders (NY: Moffat, Yard, 1908), full text.
  • Parishioner Ernest Jacoby started a group for alcoholic men with special emphasis on fellowship as a path to recovery.  It eventually moved from our basement and continued into the 1930s as the Jacoby Club.  The first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in Boston was held in 1940 at the Club, then at 115 Newbury Street.

  • Entrance of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

    The first section of parishioner Guy Lowell‘s design for the Museum of Fine Arts was completed. Lowell (1870-1927) also designed the Charles River Dam (built in 1910) and the Esplanade from the Charlesgate to the dam.  For more about him and his other architectural achievements, please see Wikipedia.

 

 

 

1. Ruth Hoppin, Priscilla’s Letter: Finding the Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Ft. Bragg CA: Lost Coast Press, 2000.

1904

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  • Leighton Parks was called to St. Bartholomew’s, New York City.

    The Rev. Dr. Elwood Worcester

  • The Rev. Dr. Elwood Worcester was called as our fourth rector.  He had received a PhD. from the University of Leipzig, where he studied psychology under Wilhelm Wundt and Gustav Fechner.  Upon his arrival he started the Emmanuel Class for Tuberculosis, which became the basis for what the press named the Emmanuel Movement.
  • Architect Arthur Lawrence Rotch became junior warden.

For more about the Worcester years please see the chapter on him in Emmanuel Church, 1860-1960: The First Hundred Years.

For more about the Emmanuel Movement please search our page & Timeline entries:  1905, 1909 & 1919.

1896

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  • 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.

1892

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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

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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.

1888

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  • 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.”

1883

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Memorial bronze bust of The Rev. Dr. Alexander Hamilton Vinton by Augustus St. Gaudens was installed in the nave.  It was finally dedicated in 1894. For details please see an article in the Boston Daily Globe.

The family of the late Benjamin Smith Rotch endowed the Rotch Travelling Scholarship for architects.

See also