St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral (Memphis, Tennessee)

Sisters of St. Mary at Memphis
	Charles Quintard
Disestablished	1910, when the sisters formally moved to St. Mary's on the Mountain Convent, Sewanee, Tennessee
Mother house	Mount St. Gabriel Convent, Peerskill, New York
Diocese	Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee
People
Founder(s)	Sister Constance, superior at Memphis; Sister Harriet, founder and mother superior, Sisterhood of St. Mary
Important associated figures	Constance and her Companions (yellow fever martyrs listed in the Episcopal Calendar of Saints)
Site
Location	On the close of St. Mary's Cathedral, Memphis, Tennessee
Visible remains	Sisters' Chapel (on the cathedral close), original New York 1865 Sisters' altar (in the cathedral nave), group grave marker of yellow fever martyrs at Elmwood Cemetery
Public access	Today, a number of St. Mary's Cathedral members (men and women, lay and ordained) are also associates of the Community of St. Mary: people who commit themselves to follow a personal "rule of life".

St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral
St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral
	IV (Southeast)
Diocese	West Tennessee
Clergy
Bishop(s)	Phoebe A. Roaf
Dean	Gary Meade (interim)
Laity
Director of music	Dennis Janzer

St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral, designed by Memphis architect Bayard Snowden Cairns, located near downtown Memphis, Tennessee, is the cathedral church of the Episcopal Diocese of West Tennessee and the former cathedral of the old statewide Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee.

History

St. Mary's was founded as a "North Memphis" mission chapel by the Ladies' Educational and Missionary Society of

Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 1857.^[1]

An item in the Memphis Appeal, dated November 29, describes the occasion:

The Mission Church on Poplar Street. This Church which has been erected by the pious zeal of the ladies belonging to the Episcopal Church of this city was organized Thanksgiving Day by the election of
wardens and vestrymen. The Church is called St. Mary's, and the Reverend Richard Hines has been chosen rector
. Mr. Hines has arrived in the city and will preach at St. Mary's this morning. The seats are all free, the expenses of the Church are defrayed by the offering of the congregation.

Unlike its mother church, Calvary, this new parish would not have designated family pews or charge rent for them, enabling less affluent Memphians to regularly attend Episcopal services for the first time.

St. Mary's was officially consecrated as a

Ascension Day, May 13, 1858, by the Rt. Rev. James Hervey Otey, the first Bishop of Tennessee, with assistance from the rectors of Calvary and Grace (Memphis), St. Luke's (Jackson), St. Mary's (Covington), St. James (Bolivar

), and by the new parish's own rector, Richard Hines, who would remain there until 1871.

First Episcopal cathedral in the South (1871)

Thirteen years after its founding, St. Mary's became the first Episcopal cathedral in the American South.[2] While the 1866 Journal of the Proceedings of the Diocese of Tennessee's 34th convention and the national Episcopal Church's 1868 Journal of the General Convention both list St. Mary's as a cathedral church, the official transition from parish to "bishop's church" was January 1, 1871.

At the time, only a handful of Episcopal dioceses had adopted the English-style

Roman Catholic-style liturgy began to take root in the United States, Episcopal cathedrals began to appear. With a devoted high churchman as its bishop (Quintard), the Diocese of Tennessee became an early adopter

of this trend.

Relief center during 1878 yellow fever epidemic

Memphis suffered periodic epidemics of yellow fever, a mosquito-borne hemorrhagic viral infection (related to dengue fever and Ebola) throughout the 19th century. The worst of the epidemics occurred in the summer of 1878, when 5,150 Memphians died and the fast-growing city lost its charter due to depopulation. Five years earlier, a group of Episcopal nuns from the recently formed Sisters of St. Mary (now the Community of St. Mary) were invited by Bishop Quintard to come to Memphis and take over operation of the St. Mary's School for Girls, now called St. Mary's Episcopal School, which had been relocated to the cathedral site.^[3]

When the 1878 epidemic struck, a number of priests and nuns (both Protestant and Catholic), physicians, and even a

Lesser Feasts and Fasts

in 1981, their feast day (September 9) commemorates their sacrifices.

A traditional Anglican prayer memorializes the martyrs in this way:

We give thee thanks and praise, O God of compassion, for the Heroic witness of Constance and her companions, who, in a time of plague and pestilence, were steadfast in their care for the sick and the dying, and loved not their own lives, even unto death. Inspire in us a like love and commitment to those in need, following the example of our Savior Jesus Christ...

Constance and Her Companions

Sister Constance (née Caroline Louise Darling, born Medway, Massachusetts, 1846), sister superior, headmistress of St. Mary's School for Girls.
Sister Thecla, sacristan of St. Mary's Cathedral and its school chapel, instructor in music and grammar (English and Latin)
Sister Ruth, nurse at
Trinity Infirmary, New York
Sister Frances, a newly professed nun given charge of the Church Home orphanage
The Rev. Charles Carroll Parsons, rector of both
in Kansas, defense counsel in Custer's 1867 court-martial trial
.

The Rev. Louis S. Schuyler, newly ordained assistant rector at Parsons' prior parish, Holy Innocents Episcopal Church, Hoboken, New Jersey

The Very Rev. George Harris, dean of the cathedral, survived his bout with yellow fever, as did Sister Hughetta (née Snowden), who immediately succeeded Constance as sister superior and remained head of the order's work in Tennessee until 1925.^[4]