The Archives of the Episcopal Church traces its beginnings to the early 19th century to a point in time when it was unclear whether The Episcopal Church had a credible future in the United States. The combination of its association with the Church of England, the anti-episcopal sentiment of a republican and egalitarian culture, and the sweeping embrace of fervent religion in the two Great Awakenings offered faint prospects for a church that had not yet discovered how to graft its Anglican inheritance of moderation in matters of worship and religious discourse onto the American landscape.
The early American Episcopal Church was forced to innovate and did so in part by reclaiming its Anglican roots and broadcasting them as alive and ready to meet the demands of early American life. A key innovation was the General Convention’s action in 1835 to commission the formal gathering of the archives of the early, colonial church by a conservator designated by the General Convention. This was a signal and precedent setting event.1 The archives were seen as an important bridge to the Episcopal Church’s future—recognized as important testament to both a symbolic container of public presence and the ongoing narrative of an emerging new identity.
The Rev. Francis Lister Hawks was appointed first “Conservator” and custodian of the archives, which were to be maintained in a separate depository at the General Theological Seminary. Hawks worked from 1835 to 1865 to gather original papers and manuscripts from the former colonial dioceses and copies of documents from England, creating eighteen bound volumes of the original papers and archives of the General Convention. Funding for the work came from several sources, including a large gift from Trinity Church, New York City.
The Rev. William Stevens Perry who succeeded Hawks in 1868 as custodian of the archives, reported in 1895 that the archives had been moved to “a depository we now have at the Church Mission House for the preservation of our Church’s historical documents.” A Joint Standing Committee of the General Convention provided oversight of the archives during this period.
The gathering of the church’s several boards and agencies into a single New York City based National Council in 1921 may have given rise to the need to find safer quarters for the early manuscript portion of the General Convention’s archives. In 1930, the archives, as gathered by Hawks and Perry, were placed on deposit at the New-York Historical Society.
The absence of an active oversight committee or custodian created a problem for the centralized church bodies as the contemporary archives and operational records accumulated at the Church Mission House. The solution seemed to come in the form of the Church Historical Society (CHS) which saw the archives as a way to generate interest and purpose and to connect independent church historians to the mission and work of the church.
In 1940 the General Convention designated the CHS—at that time located at the Philadelphia Divinity School—to house, service, preserve, and keep safe the General Convention’s more contemporary archives. The 1940 arrangement provided a block grant to the CHS for the care of the archives and the support of CHS and its journal publication.
Arrangements were made to move the archives and other historical collections to a modern building at the new Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest (ETSS) in Austin when it became clear that the Philadelphia seminary was closing to merge with the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The first train car arrived in Austin in 1957 and a full time, professional, archivist was hired two years later. The colonial-era archives were returned to the General Convention by the New-York Historical Society and transferred to the custody of the Church Historical Society in Austin. For the first time since 1920, the historical and contemporary collections were reunited. During this time a professional program of archives acquisition, processing, and reference service developed under the leadership of Dr. V. Nelle Bellamy and the CHS board.
By the early 1970s, the CHS board was having difficulty balancing the needs of the archives with their historical interests. Large collections of records were being held back by The Episcopal Church’s “national” offices and the General Convention agencies as the separateness of the CHS and the remoteness of the Austin facility combined to weaken the administrative ties, governance support, and historical needs of the institutional church.
In 1986, under the leadership of Bishop Scott Field Bailey of West Texas, the General Convention created by Canon I.1.5, a separate Board of the Archives to oversee the archival assets and professional program on behalf of the General Convention and the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society.
The return of the church archives to the custody of General Convention opened the door for the expansion of the archival holdings held on the second floor of the ETSS library building. The canonical reintegration and establishment of an accountability board set the stage for a new understanding of how the church’s archives could become an integral component of The Episcopal Church’s modern communication and information landscape. With that goal in mind, the Archives Board recruited and hired The Episcopal Church’s second archivist, Mark J. Duffy in 1992.
Efforts turned to more firmly integrate the archives operation into the administrative umbrella of the church’s corporate body, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society. Funding for a records management officer and additional research support staff led to a greater visibility of the archives program in aiding the work of the General Convention and its interim bodies.
Over 10,000 cubic feet of historical records housed in basements, closets and storage rooms at the church’s New York headquarters were appraised, with about 60% of the material designated for the permanent archives or long term administrative retention. By 2003, the Church’s archives were finally united intellectually, but remained housed in four separate physical locations.
In 2020, the Archives were asked to vacate their home at the Seminary of the Southwest (formerly ETSS) in order for the Seminary to begin a long-planned renovation of their library. In the early summer of 2021, the Archives staff began the onerous task of relocating approximately 7,000 cubic feet of historic records of The Episcopal Church from the seminary library to an interim Austin location. During this time, the Archives continued to provide limited research services while bringing new order to their holdings. On March 31, 2022, Mark J. Duffy, Canonical Archivist and Director, retired.
In July 2022, the General Convention voted to eliminate the Board of the Archives oversight body and replace it with the Archives Advisory Committee to “provide advice regarding identification, collection, preservation, management, use, and accessibility of records, and establishment of best practices regarding the same to the Archivist, the Archives, and Executive Council.”
The Archives of the Episcopal Church continue to grow while the church awaits a long-term solution to the pressing need to house its records in a single, permanent, environmentally sound repository. The Archives program continually adapts to the rapid social and technological changes affecting the way The Episcopal Church communicates and documents its mission. These efforts include the expansion of the Digital Archives, an electronic records acquisition and preservation program, the development of an online catalog, and an electronic records repository for church-wide historical records.
In its effort to “further the historical dimension of the mission of the church,” the Archives seeks to document all aspects of The Episcopal Church, acquiring collections of personal papers, records of Episcopal Church organizations, and special collections such as oral histories in addition to the official records of the General Convention and the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society.
- The commissioning of a Conservator for the General Convention’s archives came 31 years after the establishment of the New-York Historical Society (1804) and pre-dates the establishment of the Presbyterian (1852) and Baptist (1853) historical archives. ↩︎