St. Mary's-in-Tuxedo Episcopal Church, otherwise simply referred to as St. Mary's-in-Tuxedo, is an active Episcopal church in Tuxedo, New York, located within the historic village of Tuxedo Park."National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service.
Constructed in 1888 according to designs by architect William Appleton Potter, the Shingle style community church was the result of efforts to establish a permanent place of worship for Tuxedo's predominantly Episcopalian residents. The church's interior features the work of architect Bertram Goodhue and sculptor Lee Lawrie, which accompanies the many examples of late 19th- and early 20th-century stained glass produced by prominent artists, including Louis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge. Later additions to the wider campus include designs by Richard Howland Hunt and James Brown Lord.
Many high society weddings have taken place at St. Mary's over the years, including that of Angier B. Duke to Priscilla Avenal St. George in 1937. Earlier services were attended by financier J. P. Morgan and on two occasions by future President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The lives of several people associated with Tuxedo Park are memorialized within the church, while the St. Mary's cemetery is the final resting place for several noted figures of the American Gilded Age.
History Establishment The brother-in-law of Tuxedo Park founder Pierre Lorillard IV, Henry Isaac Barbey, offered to arrange for the construction of a village church in 1887. Previously the community had used both a local public schoolhouse—at the instigation of Tuxedo Park resident Robert Fulton Cutting—and later a temporary chapel designed by James Brown Lord for Episcopal services, the first of which took place in Tuxedo on July 18, 1886.Town of Tuxedo Bicentennial Commission Calendar. Via the Tuxedo Park Library. Following its construction St. Mary's was consecrated on October 14, 1888, by architect William A. Potter's brother, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York Henry Codman Potter;Crofut, Doris (1975). St. Mary's-in-Tuxedo, 1888–1975. Tuxedo Park, NY: Library Research Associates Inc. . p. 5. the church was dedicated to Saint Mary. Founding vestry members included Grenville Kane, co-founder of the Park and a director of Northern Pacific Railway and the New York Public Library, James Brown Potter, the Brown Brothers merchant banker married to actress Cora Urquhart who reputedly introduced the tuxedo to America, and James L. Breese, an accomplished amateur photographer and owner of "The Orchard".Crofut 1975, p. 5.
Early history St. Mary's soon became an established institution within the wider Tuxedo community. Pew rent records indicate the range of Tuxedo families who were involved in church life, including Frelinghuysens, Lorillards, Cuttings and Mortimers. Active by the 1890s, the St. Mary's Sunday school held at least one of its annual picnics on the grounds of William Waldorf Astor's Tuxedo Park estate.Crofut 1975, p. 9. When the Reverend George Merrill returned to Tuxedo from Newport after his marriage to Ms. Pauline Dresser in December 1897, his daughter relayed that "the entire village met them at the train with great flaming lanterns and led them to the church through the snow singing 'Onward Christian Soldiers'."Crofut 1975, p. 13. When Tuxedo's recently established Our Lady of Mount Carmel Roman Catholic church was completely destroyed by fire on July 4, 1899, the Rev. Merrill invited the affected congregation to worship in the St. Mary's Sunday School room while the new Heins & LaFarge-designed building was being constructed.
Tuxedo resident and author George M. Rushmore offers a vignette of the Sunday procession to St. Mary's during the 1890s in The World with a Fence Around It: Tuxedo Park – The Early Days (1957):Rushmore 1957, pp. 112–113.
Tuxedo women supported St. Mary's in a variety of ways, becoming members of church-affiliated committees and guilds. Examples include Clemence Smith Bryce, wife of Nicholas Fish II, who provided a musical reception at the parish house opening reception in 1901,Crofut 1975, p. 15. and Josephine Lee, wife of architect Bruce Price, who was a member of the Sewing School Committee."Guilds". St. Mary's Chronicle. 1 (10): 1. November 28, 1901 – via the St. Mary's Parish House Breezeway. The St. Mary's Guild was founded by a number of Tuxedo women in June 1891,Crofut 1975, p. 8. tasked with supervising several church organizations. A significant gift of $10,000 was provided by financier Robert Fulton Cutting in 1919, ensuring the Guild's financial stability during the Great Depression.Crofut 1975, p. 25.
Several sources attest to the extensive decorations that accompanied the era's weddings at St. Mary's. Parts of the church's nave and sanctuary, including the aisles, pews, altar and columns, were decorated with a wide variety of seasonal and imported foliage; examples include palms, lilies, peonies, holly, roses, dogwood, ferns, fruit blossoms, dahlias, gladioluses, snapdragons, forsythia and syringa. Arches were covered with woodland foliage and laurel, while the rafters were filled with branches of balsam. On one occasion a wedding bell formed from white roses was hung from a central arch in the nave. A wedding gown first worn in 1768 and later worn by Julia Thorne at her 1970 marriage to John Kerry was worn by Julia Loomis Thorne, Alfred Lee Loomis's sister, at her St. Mary's wedding in 1911. The gown was once described by The New York Times as being "perhaps the most notable wedding gown in existence in this country".
St. Mary's for many years operated a chapel in neighboring Sloatsburg, New York, a ministry which began when the Rev. Merrill starting conducting services in the Sloatsburg town hall in 1900. By 1904 land was deeded to St. Mary's to construct a chapel, consecrated as "St. Francis" that autumn. An advisory board was established for St. Francis' Chapel in the 1930s and was shared for a time with the nearby St. Elizabeth's Memorial Chapel in the Eagle Valley hamlet of Tuxedo. St. Mary's ties with St. Francis ended in 1953 when the latter became a diocesan mission. The chapel subsequently closed in 1974.
Historical sources relate that St. Mary's supported itself and its activities through its endowment, annual contributions and pew rentals, which in 1926 were set at $100 per pew.Year Book of Tuxedo Park. Tuxedo Securities Corporation. 1926. p. 7. Via the Tuxedo Park Library. During the 1920s the church continued to play a major role in the community, serving as the initial meeting place for local chapters of the American Legion, Freemasons, and Order of the Eastern Star.
A single-manual, 11-stop Roosevelt organ (Opus 399) was built for the church in 1888. Only by 1919 was St. Mary's able to secure a permanent organist, Fred Bentley, who maintained this position until his death in 1960.Crofut 1975, p. 23. Another early St. Mary's organist was Frank H. Mather, a graduate of the Royal Academy and Royal College of Music in London. Tragedy struck the parish when four-time U.S. singles championship tennis player and Tuxedo resident Robert Wrenn struck and killed St. Mary's organist and choirmaster Herbert George Loveday after losing control of his vehicle on May 3, 1914. Charges of manslaughter against Wrenn were subsequently dropped.
Post-Depression era The Wall Street Crash of 1929 took a toll on parish life and the church's finances, as the congregation and the pew rents it provided reduced in size.Crofut 1975, pp. 29–30. Several parishioners soon defected to nearby St. Elizabeth's in Eagle Valley, having found themselves unaccustomed to the high church style of the new rector, the Reverend Leon Cartmell. The "lean years" soon drew to a close however with the end of World War II, with the relocation of young families to the suburbs rejuvenating a stagnated church life.Crofut 1975, p. 38. The Reverend Fenimore Cooper made further efforts to encourage participation in church life, forming several guilds for ushers, acolytes and lay readers.Although not formally affiliated with St. Mary's, the New York diocese established a diocesan conference center named after Bishop Donegan in Tuxedo Park in 1957. St. Mary's was occasionally represented at conferences held at the center.Crofut 1975, p. 44. Father Cooper was a member of the committee tasked with renovating the center, which at one point housed the Tuxedo Park School. The T. Henry Randall-designed estate was the former residence of Henry W. Poor and Henry Morgan Tilford, and was described by the New York Times as "one of the finest country residences in America"."H.M. TILFORD DIES. Ex-Vice President of Standard Oil Left $20,000,000". The New York Times. December 4, 1919. Retrieved February 18, 2019. The American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese of North America purchased the home from the Episcopal church in 1978 to establish a monastic community.
The financial troubles that had plagued the parish since the Depression had eased by the 1960s, a reversal of fortunes attributed to successful endowment investing and a growing local population. Over several years until its completion in 1962, Francis Ormond French, son of Manhattan Trust banker Amos Tuck French, helped to raise the $60,000 needed to construct the St. Mary's education building. French died the very morning of the dedication ceremony held on Trinity Sunday, 1962 for the building that to this day bears his name. Henry Mortimer financed parish house and undercroft renovations in 1971, dedicating these revisions alongside his siblings—including John Jay Mortimer and Stanley Grafton Mortimer—to his parents.Crofut 1975, p. 54. By 1973 a new 3-manual, 35-stop Austin organ (Opus 2557) was installed at St. Mary's; the organist for the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York City, Mr. Charles D. Walker, was invited to play a special inaugural concert.Crofut 1975, p. 55. The serial entrepreneur and Tuxedo Park resident Hazard Reeves was inspired to found what was "said to be the world's first computerized multi-catalogue shopping system", Catalogia, after struggling to find a bell chime timing device for St. Mary's.
One-time Tuxedo resident Jimmy Webb wrote a cantata for a children's choir and small orchestra for St. Mary's, first performed in December 1983. An expanded version was later performed by Art Garfunkel and Amy Grant for the 1986 album The Animals' Christmas. Other noteworthy musical events held at St. Mary's include a 1985–1986 concert series that featured a performance by clarinetist Gervase de Peyer, and a 1993 concert held in collaboration with the Edvard Grieg Society of New York featuring the soprano Bodil Arnesen.
In 1974, Bishop of New York Paul Moore Jr. visited St. Mary's to install board members for a local conference of Episcopal churches known as the Southern Orange Community.Crofut 1975, p. 58. Bishop Moore would return to the parish several years later to lead a special service celebrating the centennial of the founding of St. Mary's, held on October 16, 1988.
Recent years have seen efforts to restore several of the church's stained glass windows and the establishment of a building preservation fund to aid repairs and ongoing maintenance. A report commissioned by the church in 2019 identified several critical areas in need of repair in both the church and the nearby rectory.
Notable people