Rev. John Bartow, First Anglican Minister at St. Paul's, Eastchester (1702–1725)

Reverend John Bartow was the first Church of England rector of the parish of St. Paul's, in Eastchester, from 1702 to 1725. The legacy he began lasted until 1980, when St. Paul's was deconsecrated as an Episcopal church. Mild-mannered and loyal to his church, he might have seemed ill-suited to planting it in towns content with their own religion and not looking for missionaries — yet his patience and quiet persistence were perhaps just what the task needed.

The Eastchester meetinghouse, the first church at St. Paul's, as it probably looked in the early 1700s when Bartow began his ministry. NPS.

From Devonshire to New York

Bartow was born in 1673 to a family of modest means in Devonshire, England, descended from Huguenots — the Bertauts — who had fled Brittany during the religious wars of the 1500s. At 16 he entered Cambridge as a sizar, working in the kitchen and grounds in return for free board and tuition. Ordained an Anglican priest, he served as an assistant in several parishes, and church authorities praised his sober, grave conduct and "unblemished Life and conversation."

That record made him one of the first missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), founded by the Church of England in 1701 to place Anglican ministers throughout Britain's American colonies. The plan clashed with local religious independence — including at Eastchester, a small Westchester County village about 20 miles north of New York City that had run its own church since the 1660s with Puritan, mostly Presbyterian, ministers. New York's Ministry Law of 1693 had created six publicly supported parishes in southern New York, each to have "a good sufficient Protestant Minister"; the royal governor read that as an Anglican clergyman.

A large, rural parish

Bartow's parish — Eastchester, Westchester Square, New Rochelle, Yonkers and Pelham — covered more than 100 square miles. He lived mostly at Westchester, about five miles south of St. Paul's. Where perhaps 600,000 people now live, his parish held about 200 families, some 1,500 to 2,000 colonists, in a rural, pre-industrial landscape. Along poor dirt roads he tended the sick and dying in epidemics, buried the dead, and comforted parents who had lost children to disease, Indian raids and animal attacks. The church was short of clergy, so he sometimes preached in New Jersey and on Long Island too.

His main rivals were the Presbyterians, but he also recorded "ganglings and contentions" with Deists, atheists and Quakers among the farmers and tradesmen. He also worked to win enslaved and free African Americans and Native Americans to his faith.

Two ways of worship

Anglicans stressed godly behaviour, faith and ritual; dissenting churches like Eastchester's stressed the inner spiritual life, a dramatic personal conversion, and more emotional worship. A surviving 1722 sermon to the Eastchester congregation, on "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35), used scripture, everyday analogies and admonition over perhaps 50 minutes to argue that God favours those who help others. Communion divided the two sides: Anglicans offered it to all the baptized, Presbyterians only to those showing evidence of salvation — a difference that troubled Bartow throughout. The Anglican emphasis on baptism also met resistance.

He had the royal governor's backing and, on paper, a living raised from the towns in money or produce, but payment was irregular and seldom enforced. He was given church land, but his letters to London describe a constant struggle to support his family; he and his wife, Helena, raised six sons to adulthood.

Eastchester

On a cold November day in 1702, despite "threatening words" from some villagers, Bartow reached the village of about 200 people. The Presbyterian minister held the morning service while Bartow waited at the back of the small wooden meetinghouse, then led the town's first Church of England service in the afternoon.

He disliked the arrangement but had to accept it. Local officials would not have helped suppress the dissenters, and in nearby Jamaica, Queens, he saw a forceful attempt to impose Anglicanism produce fights over the church, protests, shouted interruptions of sermons and even the removal of the pews during a service. With so many churches to serve, he came to Eastchester only about once a month, sometimes less, leaving plenty of room for Presbyterian services.

Progress came in fits and starts — "three steps forward, two and a half steps back." People came to his services and listened politely, but he remained a welcome outsider. In 1711 he wrote that the parish seemed inclined to his church on the surface, but that old prejudices and upbringing might reassert themselves at any time; like many missionaries, he hoped the children of Presbyterian parents would grow up Anglican. In 1718 he admitted that the town was again hiring a Presbyterian minister for the weeks he could not come: the people had told him they would be content only if he preached every Sunday. But in October 1725 he reported with pride that the church's pulpit, painted wainscot and a new gallery were finished, and that the Presbyterian minister was no longer allowed to preach there.

Legacy

Bartow died in 1727 and was buried at St. Peter's Church, in today's Tremont section of the Bronx. Three more SPG ministers served the parish before the Revolution, facing the same struggles. After the war, St. Paul's became an Episcopal church, successor to the Church of England in the new republic. The dissenting tradition probably lingered until the 1850s, but the Episcopal affiliation lasted until 1980, when the diocese gave the property to the National Park Service.

Sources

• National Park Service, St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, "Rev. John Bartow: First Anglican minister at St. Paul's." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/rev-john-bartow-first-anglican-minister-at-st-paul-s.htm