Rev. Thomas Standard: The Colonial Minister Buried Beneath St. Paul's

The small bronze bell inscribed with Rev. Thomas Standard's name, cast in 1758 at the London foundry that made the Liberty Bell, still hangs in the St. Paul's steeple — and inspires its ghost stories. NPS.

Thomas Standard is one of the giants of St. Paul's Church history: minister for 33 years, donor of the bronze bell bought from a London foundry in 1758, and the man whose burial and later reburial beneath the church feed most of its ghost stories. For much of his tenure, though, he was an outsider, even hostile to his flock.

An established church in a Puritan town

• The English took New York in 1664 but made the Church of England the official religion only in the 1690s, to bind a religiously diverse colony more firmly to the Crown.
• Alarmed at Anglicanism's weakness there, King William III created the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) in 1701 to send priests and teachers to America.
• The Westchester parish including St. Paul's was among the first to get an SPG minister, Rev. John Bartow, in 1702. The townspeople were Puritan dissenters — Congregational or Presbyterian since the 1660s — who had come partly to escape the Church of England. Bartow wisely took a soft approach, allowing Presbyterian services when he preached elsewhere.

A different rector

Standard, born in England in 1680, sought an SPG post partly for the guaranteed salary, paid by local taxes, when many clergy were "starving at home."

• Brookhaven, Long Island (September 1725): welcomed "with all imaginable marks of respect and affection," he soon grumbled about the remote parish, its lack of a church, and "the diet of this country whose meat is salt beef and pork." He asked for Westchester, "but 4 or five hours ride from (New) York."
• St. Paul's (1727): determined to win Puritans "who were in love with extemporary prayers," he criticized Bartow for letting "the independents" use the church, discouraged Presbyterian services even when he wasn't preaching, and focused on teaching Anglicanism to the children.
• An outsider's complaints: the "indolence and restiveness of the inhabitants," and winters "severely cold with very hard frost and deep snows," reckoning "six months of cold and six of hot weather."

Accused

In 1735 residents petitioned the SPG's leading New York clergyman to remove him for his "irregular life and evil deportment." They charged that he called parishioners "cabbage stalks," was "much given to strong drink," made frequent trips to New York to the neglect of his parish, sometimes returning "in liquor" — and, being a physician, charged fees for medical care on visits made as pastor. Other parishioners defended him, and he was never dismissed.

Mellowing

In the early 1740s he moved into a house beside the church. Over the years he changed: he let non-Anglicans worship in the town meetinghouse, age and illness in the 1750s sapped his combativeness, and some of the children he'd taught grew into committed Anglicans. The community never fully embraced the Church of England, but Standard set the parish on its road to becoming Anglican/Episcopal.

Burial and reburial

• January 1760: he died at 80 and was buried beneath the wooden meetinghouse — an honor for leading figures, showing how far he'd come. The bell, inscribed "The Gift of the Rev. Thomas Standard, 1758," surely tolled for him. His wife Mary, who died in a terrible hearth fire in January 1758, lay there too.
• The Revolution: armies tore down the wooden church for firewood to heat the stone and brick St. Paul's, then a field hospital. The coffins survived, but with the building gone their exact place was hard to find.
• 1818: 58 years after his death, parishioners exhumed the coffins and reburied them under the east wing of today's church. A memorial tablet, still visible on a basement wall, followed in 1875.

Those long delays set the stage for the ghost stories still swirling around St. Paul's.

Sources

Based on "Thomas Standard: The Colonial era minister buried beneath St. Paul's Church," St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.