St. Paul's Church Between the World Wars: How a National Historic Site Emerged

St. Paul's Church and cemetery in the 1930s, with industry closing in. NPS.

From an exhibition at St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, Mount Vernon, New York, on display through January 2025.

St. Paul's Church, an Episcopal parish with roots in the 1600s, became a national historic site in the 1920s and 1930s. Under Rev. Harold Weigle, nearly all of today's site took shape: the old burial yard became a walking space, partly with Federal relief money; the city's potter's field closed; a carriage house became a hall for people; and the church interior's 18th-century restoration was planned. Meanwhile industry swallowed the old rural landscape and pushed out an African American family that had lived beside the church since the early 1800s.

The 1920s: automobiles and a parish hall

• From horses to cars: a wooden horse shed of the 1830s was replaced in the late 1880s by a masonry carriage house, funded by a wealthy parishioner. By the mid-1920s the automobile had made it obsolete.
• A changing neighborhood: in 1920, several 18th-century homes still stood nearby, but residents left for the suburbs. The Hutchinson River Parkway opened in 1928; Westchester went from one car per 7.2 people in 1922 to one per 3.7 in 1930, the highest rate of any county in the nation. Mount Vernon and the neighboring Bronx rezoned the area commercial and industrial.
• A parish hall: the church, a parish since the 1660s, went into debt to convert the carriage house into its first real parish hall, finished in 1925 — a place for commemorations and public events that Franklin D. Roosevelt and others attended.

Rev. Harold Weigle's vision

• The minister: installed in 1929, Weigle and his wife Anna had been missionaries in China after he graduated from Cornell in 1921. St. Paul's was a declining parish in an industrializing corridor far from Manhattan.
• The idea: he built a historic shrine around the 1733 open-air election on the village green, reported in the first issue of John Peter Zenger's New York Weekly Journal. Zenger's later acquittal on seditious libel charges was a landmark for freedom of the press and an early symbol of the First Amendment.
• Publicity: drawing on theater friends from his time at Manhattan's Little Church Around the Corner, he staged reenactments and pageants. On June 14, 1931, about 7,000 people came — the largest gathering in the church's history — to hear Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, a distant relative of an 18th-century congregant.
• The result: fundraising, helped by FDR's mother Sara Delano Roosevelt, ran into the early 1940s and restored the church interior to its 18th-century look. St. Paul's was declared a national historic site in 1942.

New Deal work in the cemetery

The Depression helped modernize one of the nation's oldest burial yards, with legible stones from 1704. The Civil Works Administration (CWA), created in 1933, could fund work on private property, unlike later New Deal agencies. In March 1934, St. Paul's received $34,000 (about $740,000 today) for labor: dry wells to prevent flooding and the stone wall on South Columbus Avenue, both still there.

The most ambitious — and controversial — project reset the stones. Footstones, once about six feet behind the headstones, were moved right behind them; late-19th- and early-20th-century granite stones were laid flat as "too modern, and not Colonial"; family-plot ironwork came out; and stones were lined up in rows. A monument maker even went to court over a rejected granite stone. Critics said it changed the yard's historic character, but it made the five-acre burial ground walkable, and it still shapes the site's tours.

The Depression at home

Nationwide unemployment hit about 25 percent in 1932, with about a million people out of work in New York City. In Mount Vernon, food aid ran short of butter, milk and eggs in 1934; YWCA volunteers sewed clothes for unemployed families' children; thousands of men worked on public works, and young men went to Civilian Conservation Corps camps. The city, near bankruptcy, couldn't pay its teachers — which puts the foreclosure of the Turner-Nelson homestead in context.

The church struggled too: mortgages it had made to parishioners in the 1920s went into default. Church suppers and bridge parties, Anna Weigle recalled, raised almost nothing, so the church courted wealthy donors for the restoration — widening its audience, but ceding control and clashing with longtime members who resented recreating the 18th-century church.

The end of the potter's field

The cemetery's western side, behind the church, was the historic churchyard; the eastern side was a public burial ground under the Town of Eastchester and, from 1892, the City of Mount Vernon. Burials there grew in the 1890s — among them Dr. Charles S. Taft, one of the surgeons attending Lincoln after he was shot in 1865, who died in 1900. From at least 1910, and increasingly by the early 1920s, it served as a potter's field, with 680 burials in trench graves, many of them infants of poor families or unidentified accident victims.

In the 1930s, the church objected, calling the stacked coffins a health hazard and sued, up to the State Supreme Court. Court-ordered ground probes, done secretly at dawn or dusk to avoid a spectacle, produced disputed results, but the trench burials ended in 1939 — another step toward national recognition.

The Turner-Nelson homestead

In 1934, Sarah E. Nelson, last heir of the family land beside the church, wrote: "It is now over a hundred years ago, since our dear and godly grandparents, gathered their children for family prayers, morning and evenings, and a blessing at each meal and it was handed down to us, to me, the last heir."

• Freedom and land: her grandmother Rebecca Turner, born in 1781, was enslaved by a local family and gained her freedom in 1810, probably bought by her husband Benjamin. They settled just east of the church on the Hutchinson River, with a cabin, a small farm, fish, clams and oysters, and raised six children, who went to the integrated public schools. Ben served as assistant pounder, holding stray animals until owners paid a fine.
• Faith: facing segregation at St. Paul's, including a separate Sunday school, they helped form Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church nearby in the mid-1830s. After Ben died then, Rebecca ran a laundry and the farm for 40 years — rare for a Black woman in New York — and was buried at St. Paul's after her death in 1874, at 93.
• The last heirs: her granddaughters Maria (Nelson) Williams and Sarah E. Nelson kept taking in wash, but rising taxes, sewage in their well, ash from a burning dump, and rowdy tavern crowds made it impossible. They left in 1910 for Tenafly, New Jersey, still paying taxes on the land. It was foreclosed in 1936 and sold to an energy company, extending "Oil City" along the river.
• Remembered: Maria died in 1931 and was buried at St. Paul's; Sarah died in Nyack in 1941, at 86, her tie to the homestead unknown to her neighbors. In the 21st century, local schools were renamed the Rebecca Turner Elementary School and Benjamin Turner Middle School.

Sources

Based on "The Emergence of a National Historic Site: St. Paul's Between the World Wars," exhibition text, Saint Paul's Church National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.