Rev. William H. Weigle: The Rector Who Made St. Paul's a Historic Site

A 1934 Civil Works Administration project, one of Rev. William H. Weigle's, re-designed the historic cemetery. NPS.

From 1929 to 1949, William H. Weigle brought a bold religious and historical vision to St. Paul's Church in Mount Vernon, New York — overseeing the biggest physical changes in the church's 300-year history and shaping its future as a historic site.

A missionary's path

• Born in 1889 in Evans City, western Pennsylvania, and raised Presbyterian.
• China: after graduating from Cornell in 1916, he taught animal husbandry at Nanking University as a missionary, becoming the college's religious director in 1918. With his wife Anna Keckman, a seminary graduate, he had the first of two children, Elizabeth, there.
• Episcopal priest: influenced by two Episcopal missionaries — and drawn to the church's ceremony — he studied at Virginia Theological Seminary, was ordained in the Shanghai diocese, and stayed through 1927, narrowly escaping the dangers of interprovincial wars.
• Broadway: back in New York, he was chaplain to the Episcopal Actors' Guild at the Church of the Transfiguration — the "Little Church Around the Corner" — where he likely acquired the flair for the historical pageants he later staged.

A fading parish, a grand plan

In 1929 he took over St. Paul's: rich in history, but losing money and members as industry swallowed the neighborhood. Amid factory noise and fumes, he pressed a plan resting on three convictions:

1. the church and burial ground should match the Colonial Revival taste for early America;
2. an election for the colonial assembly held at St. Paul's in 1733 was the origin of American civil liberties;
3. anyone who disagreed was ill-informed, misguided, even unpatriotic.

The cemetery

His first project turned the five-acre yard from a patchwork of private plots into a unified landscape. In 1934, amid the Great Depression, the Civil Works Administration granted $30,000 (about $480,000 today), employing dozens of local jobless men.

• Mounds were leveled, concrete barriers removed, stones set in straighter rows, and plot railings and chains taken up.
• Footstones were dug up and joined to headstones.
• Most controversially, he banned granite — the durable stone favored since the 1880s — requiring "historic" marble, and had many granite markers laid flat, which also cleared paths for his processions.

The church interior

His centerpiece: restoring the interior to its original 1787 appearance, begun in 1941 on the model of Bruton Parish Church at Colonial Williamsburg, to win recognition as a national historic site and revive the parish.

"Birthplace of the Bill of Rights"

The 1733 election on the village green was covered in the first issue of the New York Weekly Journal, founded by opponents of Royal Governor William Cosby. Its eyewitness account exposed a sheriff who used a religious test to bar Quakers voting for Cosby's foe Lewis Morris, the winner. Weigle claimed this led directly to the trial and acquittal of printer John Peter Zenger and so to a free press and the First Amendment. Some writers agreed; qualified historians called it an exaggeration.

When Lyon Boston, a respected lawyer and ally on the vestry, argued St. Paul's was "a" shrine to the Bill of Rights, not "THE" birthplace — a claim he thought would win more support — Weigle pushed him off the vestry.

Opposition

• Parishioners objected in vain: the sanctuary suited them, the 1787 pew plan felt alien, families had paid for the iron plot enclosures, and granite was more durable. Weigle insisted his plan alone could save the parish; several families left.
• Money: he inherited a $14,000 debt (perhaps $170,000 today) from the 1925 parish hall; diocesan support and his own salary shrank; grounds upkeep was costly, and he introduced unpopular annual plot fees.
• Fundraising: a Descendants' Day in June 1931 drew Governor Franklin Roosevelt and about 7,000 people, and caught the interest of Sara Roosevelt, his mother. With her help, professional fundraisers and donation boxes in stores nationwide, the committee raised $42,000 (about $600,000 today) over ten years for the interior.

Did it work?

The restored church and remade cemetery were a remarkable feat and helped St. Paul's become a national historic site in 1943. Historical programs drew crowds, but regular attendance stayed modest and even fell; disputes flared over his salary (he earned a Doctor of Divinity from Westminster College in 1939); operating costs rose; and neither the Diocese nor the city could fund further growth.

Weigle left in 1949, deeply frustrated, for the Episcopal Church of Our Savior in New Lebanon, near Albany, and kept criticizing, in sometimes rambling letters, the lack of support for St. Paul's. He lived to attend the 1980 ceremony transferring the property from the Diocese to the National Park Service, and died on August 14, 1981, at 92.

Sources

Based on "Rev. William H. Weigle: 20th century minister and developer of St. Paul's as a historic site," St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.