GREENVILLE, Texas - St. Paul’s Episcopal Church will mark 130 years since the opening of its first permanent church building with a free community celebration Oct. 17 featuring live music, food trucks, children’s activities and a look back at a history that includes a devastating fire and an unusual rescue by one of Greenville’s best-known mayors.
The anniversary celebration will run from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 17, at St. Paul’s, 8320 Jack Finney Blvd. Admission is free and the event is open to the public.
Activities will include live music, food trucks, vendors, children’s games, a petting zoo, cake walk, dunk tank, silent auction and raffle. Proceeds from the event will benefit St. Paul’s Episcopal School.
Bishop Rob Price of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas is expected to participate in the celebration.
The anniversary traces back to July 12, 1896, when Bishop Alexander Charles Garrett opened St. Paul’s first permanent church building at 3215 Stonewall St. at Marshall Street in downtown Greenville.
That building would serve the congregation for more than seven decades before a fire on Feb. 16, 1969, destroyed the wooden sanctuary, which at the time was Greenville’s oldest church building still in use.
One of the objects that survived the fire remains part of St. Paul’s today.
According to a 1992 history of the church written by Logan D. Wilson, Joe Ramsey, the longtime Greenville civic leader and mayor for whom Joe Ramsey Boulevard is named, carried the church’s marble baptismal font from the burning building as timbers fell around him.
Ramsey had only one arm.
The font was an original furnishing of the 1896 church. The surviving portion, which weighs more than 100 pounds, continues to be used for baptisms at St. Paul’s.
Ramsey’s rescue of the font was remembered years later at his funeral in 1983.
He was not the only person who entered or helped evacuate the church during the fire.
Wilson’s history recounts that Peggy Land and Darrel Ford brought 20 children out of the nursery. The Rev. Ray Fisher entered the sanctuary with a firefighter and later returned to the sacristy, passing vestments and altar hangings to parishioners outside.
The sanctuary itself could not be saved.
Just three days after the fire, however, the congregation assembled again for Ash Wednesday. Members constructed an altar platform in the old parish hall, cleaned pews rescued from the fire and rented an organ so services could continue.
St. Paul’s history in Greenville predates even the 1896 building.
Bishop Garrett visited Greenville on Aug. 10, 1875, when the community had a population of roughly 700 to 800 people. During that visit, he baptized 6-month-old Sarah May Heath and recorded finding only one Episcopal communicant in Greenville, the infant’s mother.
Garrett returned 18 days later and learned that Sarah had died. The following day, according to Wilson’s history, he conducted Greenville’s first Episcopal service in a Methodist church.
The Episcopal mission was formally organized in 1884.
Twelve years later, Garrett opened the congregation’s new Stonewall Street church. During the July 12, 1896, service, he preached, confirmed eight people and administered Holy Communion. Parishioners and friends supplied furnishings for the new church, including the marble baptismal font that would survive the 1969 fire.
The year of the fire also became an important one for another St. Paul’s institution. Members began the work that developed into St. Paul’s Episcopal School, relying on volunteer labor, donated furnishings and fundraisers that included spaghetti suppers.
The congregation eventually moved from downtown Greenville. Ground was broken for its church on Jack Finney Boulevard in 1973, and the new church was consecrated the following year.
More than half a century after the fire and 130 years after the opening of its first permanent church, the congregation will commemorate that history with the Oct. 17 community celebration.
The marble baptismal font that Joe Ramsey carried from the burning church will still be there, continuing the purpose for which it was placed in St. Paul’s in 1896.
