165th Anniversary - Rector's Rambling for November 17, 2024

     

Today is the 165th Anniversary of the dediction of our Chapel, the first building completed for St. John’s. 

November 17, 1859 was a Thursday that year.  Our 50th Anniversary book records that day for us. 

(A)nd on Thursday morning, November 17, 1859, the congregation assembled for the first time for their common worship, on the occasion of the Consecration of St. John’s Chapel.  With the Bishop and the Rector were twelve other clergy; the Senior Warden presented the “Instruments of Donation and Request to Consecrate,” the Rector read the “Sentence of Consecration;” the Bishop preached from Ephesians 5:32, “I speak concerning the Church;” in the Holy Communion, the first of so many celebrations at that beloved altar, the Bishop was assisted by the Reverend Rufus Murray of Mariners’ Church.  At Evening Prayer the same day, the Rector ministered the first Baptism in the parish, to Louis Alden Grelling.  Thirteen boys had been trained and organized into a choir, which sang at both these services.

St. John’s was off to a rousing start, having been built in what was a rural area outside of the City of Detroit (hard to imagine this corner being described that way back then).  Sunday worship was very well attended, and then on Monday night a parish meeting was held to re-elect the wardens and vestry and to assess pew rents.  Yes, in those days the pews were rented for the year rather than the collection plate passed around.  They ran into an immediate problem...too many people wanted to rent pews in the chapel which they thought would suffice for 5 to 10 years before having to build the larger church!

Our parish historian continues,

With the same characteristic promptness that had marked the enterprise thus far, at a Vestry meeting the following Monday night, November 28, these resolutions were adopted: “Resolved that in view of the fact that every seat in the Chapel is already rented, and that there is a large demand for additional seats, it is desirable that efforts should be made for the immediate erection of a Church seating about one thousand persons “resolved that a subscription paper for this purpose be prepared and circulated and that as soon as $10,000 in addition to the $17,000 offered by Mr. Baldwin, be obtained, the Vestry will feel authorized to take steps for the erection of the Church”  As the estimates came in for the building and furnishing of the Church, Henry Porter Baldwin and the Vestry doubled their pledges, and the total cost to build the Church was just under $49,000 which is worth $1,860,000 today.