The History of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in San Antonio

In fall 1848 the Rt. Rev. George Washington Freeman, Missionary Bishop of the Southwest for the Protestant Episcopal Church, with jurisdiction in Arkansas and most of the Indian Territory and provisional charge of the church in Texas, visited San Antonio to confirm some residents and gauge potential for a local church. Two months after establishment of the Diocese of Texas on January 1, 1849, formally organized the Episcopal Church in Texas, a group of prominent San Antonians petitioned for an Episcopal rector in San Antonio. They included Dr. George Cupples, Thomas J. Devine, Volney Howard, Nathaniel Lewis, Dr. James H. Lyons, Samuel A. Maverick, and James L. Trueheart. In May 1850 Trinity Church, San Antonio, with thirteen communicants, was admitted as a parish to the young diocese.

Trinity was served by a former Episcopal rector from Brooklyn, the Rev. John F. Fish, who was assigned as a U. S. Army chaplain in San Antonio. After his transfer two years later, the congregation struggled. The German-born Rev. George Rottenstein sought, unsuccessfully, to proselytize among San Antonio’s large number of German immigrants and left in 1856 to become the first rector of the Church of St. Matthew in Dallas. No successor could be agreed upon, and the church was paralyzed by “a state of affairs.”

Members of the moribund Trinity Church were among those who called the Rev. Lucius H. Jones, missionary and assistant rector at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Seguin, to conduct an independent Easter service in San Antonio in 1858. Those attending met with Jones the next day to form a congregation known as St. Mark’s. It was formally admitted as a parish to the Diocese of Texas two weeks later, on April 15, 1858, with Lucius Jones as rector.

St. Mark’s purchased land facing the new Travis Park at the northwest corner of East Pecan and Jefferson streets. Richard Upjohn, the renowned church architect in New York City and first president of the American Institute of Architects, was hired to design the building. For the only church he designed in Texas, and one of his few west of the Mississippi, Upjohn adapted the Ecclesiological Gothic architecture of St. Mark’s to the local climate by designing broad windows above the level of pews, so slats in the three narrow wood-framed sections below each stained-glass window could pivot open for ventilation at pew level during the hot summer months. John H. Kampmann was hired as contractor, and laying foundation stones began.

In mid-1860, one St. Mark’s vestry member, Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee, acting commander of the U. S. Army’s San Antonio-based Department of Texas and future commander of the Confederate States Army, wrote his wife in Virginia: 

…the congregation is small at best, & poor at that, nor is this a country where religion ranks preeminent in the hearts of men. I have been glad to see that the officers stationed here have been the most liberal subscribers to the church, though they of course have not a permanent interest in its erection & those now here may never see its completion. In the meantime service is held in a hired room in the heart of the city which is hot, small & noisy.

Outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 reduced St. Mark’s membership, as many members with the U. S. Army returned north. Rector Lucius Jones, though born in Connecticut, joined the Confederate Army’s Fourth Texas Cavalry as a chaplain and died of malaria in Louisiana in 1863. After the war ended in 1865, St. Mark’s sought to address the minimal public education in San Antonio by establishing a school for boys and one for girls. The boys’ school did not materialize, but under the headmastership of the rector, the Rev. Joseph J. Nicholson, Saint Mary’s Episcopal School for Girls opened in the building where St. Mark’s held services and has survived as Saint Mary’s Hall.

In 1868 the Rev. Walter Raleigh Richardson, age thirty-one, a diocesan missionary in Huntsville, began his rectorship of thirty-eight years. Construction of the native limestone church resumed in 1873, following Upjohn’s design, and was completed in 1875. At the home of St. Mark’s member Mary A. Maverick located near the Alamo, a cannon buried during an unsuccessful revolt against Spain in 1813 was rediscovered. She shipped it to a bell foundry in West Troy, New York, where the cannon was recast as the church bell.

In 1874 the Missionary District of West Texas (eventually the independent Diocese of West Texas) and the Missionary Diocese of Northern Texas were created from the territory of the Diocese of Texas. St. Mark’s was designated the cathedral church of West Texas, with Walter Richardson as its dean. Those roles ended in 1888, when the St. Mark’s vestry chose to resume its independent control of the church.

Although by 1910 St. Mark’s had nearly 1,000 communicants, the new rector, the Rev. Philip Cook, thought it still ran as “a village church.” He instituted pledging, annual budgets, and regular newsletters, and presided over erection of an adjoining parish hall and auditorium designed by Alfred Giles. Named organist and choirmaster/musical director in 1917 was Oscar J. Fox, who, during his eleven years at St. Mark’s, drew national attention to Texas by independently composing music for cowboy songs collected by John A. Lomax and others.

Growth in the 1920s led to construction of a larger, four-story brick parish house complex, designed by Giles & Beckmann in the Collegiate Gothic style. Difficulties in maintaining its debt service during the Great Depression were navigated successfully during the seven-year rectorship of the Rev. Arthur McKinstry, who in November 1934 officiated at the St. Mark’s wedding of future President Lyndon B. Johnson and Claudia “Lady Bird” Taylor. Four years later McKinstry was named Bishop of Delaware, one of ten rectors to become a bishop while serving at St. Mark’s or soon thereafter.

During the twenty-year rectorship of the Rev. Harold Gosnell that began in 1948, St. Mark’s renovated the church and added a chapel, narthex, and Gothic tower designed by St. Mark’s member and prolific Texas church architect Henry J. Steinbomer. In 1955, with 3,102 communicants and a baptized membership of 4,263, St. Mark’s was declared the largest Episcopal parish in the nation outside New York City and termed by a national church magazine “one of America’s great parishes.” Outreach included expanding the Good Samaritan Center of San Antonio on Saltillo Street; the center opened as St. Mark’s Community House in an underprivileged neighborhood on Blum Street in 1939.

The church was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1962. A key to reversing membership decline caused by growth of suburban churches and urban deterioration came in 1988 with the first purchase of nearby tracts that made parking easily available. St. Mark’s received a Texas Historical Marker in 1992 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998. Retirement in 2013 of the Rev. Michael D. Chalk, rector since 1994, was highlighted by dedication of a $15-million renovation of the church campus. He was succeeded in 2014 by the Rev. Beth Knowlton, who as rector was presiding ten years later over 1,000 members, an annual budget of $3 million, and an array of internal and outreach programs.