The 100th Anniversary (1861)

The observance appears to have been limited to a service on Wednesday, Sept. 4. It wasn’t until the vestry meeting of July 3, 1861 (photo, left, church in 1861) that planning for the “centennial festival” was even proposed – by vestryman and physician Charles Willing. The centennial committee was comprised of the rector, George Leeds; the rector’s warden, former Congressman Joseph R. Ingersoll, and accounting warden Francis Gurney Smith.
The service was probably very long, since Morning Prayer, the Litany, the Psalms, the Lessons, the sermon and then Holy Communion tend to add up. The lessons and the psalms were the same ones read 100 years before; the anthem sung was also the same:
“I have surely built Thee an House to dwell in,
A settled place for Thee to abide in…”
The Rt. Rev. William Heathcote DeLancey (photo, left) bishop of Western New York (now the Diocese of Rochester) and rector from 1836-39, preached. There had been no bishops when the church was dedicated in 1761, since American Anglicans were under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London. In 1861, DeLancey (1797-1865), was “the oldest living pastor of St. Peter’s.” Bishop William Odenheimer (above, right), who left in 1859 as St. Peter’s rector to become Bishop of New Jersey, Bishop Alonzo Potter (below, right) of Pennsylvania and Bishop Samuel Bowman, his suffragan bishop, also attended, greeted at the door by the vestries of St. Peter’s, St. James and Christ Churches.

The Sept. 10, 1861 vestry meeting voted to preserve the letters of regret from other bishops invited who couldn’t make it, including Jackson Kemper, (below, right) the church’s first missionary bishop, who had been an assistant to Bishop White. The vestry also disbursed the $207.72 (about $5,000 in today’s dollars) to Bishop Kemper for a prayer book translation in a native American tongue (that prayer book, for the Lakota (Sioux) people, was published and there is a copy in the St. Peter's Church archives); to two churches for rebuilding, to domestic missions, to Nashota House (Kemper’s seminary) and $65.72 to the rector, Dr. George Leeds, (below, left) for the poor.