Grace & St. Peter's Church is an Anglo-Catholic Episcopal parish in the city of Baltimore, in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. The congregation is the product of the 1912 amalgamation of two earlier parishes, St. Peter's Church (founded in 1803) and Grace Church (founded in 1850). Its building, constructed in Brownstone, is an elaborate example of English Gothic Revival architecture dating from 1852. Today, Grace & St. Peter's is distinguished by its Anglo-Catholic liturgy and professional choir. From 1940 to 2020, it was also home to the Wilkes School at Grace & St. Peter's, an Episcopal day school which closed in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
History
St. Peter’s Church (1803–1911)
Founded in 1802, St. Peter’s Church was the second-oldest Episcopal congregation in the city after Old Saint Paul’s (1692). The organizing vestry received a charter from the city of Baltimore “to solicit and receive subscriptions and donations, not exceeding twenty-five thousand dollars for the purpose of purchasing a lot of land […] for the building [of] a Protestant Episcopal church, to be called St. Peter’s." The first building, on Sharp and German Streets was consecrated May 27, 1804 by Bishop Claggett, and occupied until June 28, 1868. South Sharp Street (which is now called Hopkins Plaza at that latitude), and German Street (now called Redwood Street) no longer intersect. Most of the original neighborhood was demolished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to make way for business districts. (That area is currently occupied by the University of Maryland Medical Center and Royal Farms Arena.)
Eventually, with "the Westward growth of the city necessitating the abandonment of the original site," St. Peter's decamped to a temporary home in the New Assembly Rooms and broke ground on a building at the corner of Druid Hill Avenue and Lanvale Street on September 15, 1868. The church was designed in the style of the "Norman period of English Gothic" by Nathaniel Henry Hutton and John Murdoch. The cornerstone was laid on April 29, 1869, and the church was opened in October 1870.
St. Peter's was founded by congregants of Old Saint Paul's, who brought with them a distinctly Low Church, evangelical orientation. One of the first Rectors of St. Peter's, The Rev. George Dashiell (1780–1852) would actually attempt to establish his own "Evangelical Episcopal Church," in protest against the consecration of James Kemp as Bishop Suffragan of Maryland. Dashiell was deposed on December 8, 1815, as a result. More than a half-century later, another former Rector of St. Peter's would defect, largely in protest against Ritualism and emerging Anglo-Catholic tendencies in the Church: in 1873, The Rt. Rev. George David Cummins, then Assistant Bishop of Kentucky, resigned his call to found the Reformed Episcopal Church.
In spite of the political tensions in the wake of the Civil War, as well as the changing nature of the congregation's Churchmanship, St. Peter's remained an active force in the surrounding areas of Reservoir Hill, Bolton Hill (also served by Memorial Episcopal), Madison Park, and Upton from 1870 to 1911. In 1910, however, Baltimore enacted the first set of Residential Segregation Ordinances in the United States. Couched in the melioristic language of the Progressive Era, the ordinances' purported aim was "preserving peace, preventing conflict and ill feeling" between races, and "promoting the general welfare of the city." The blunt effect, however, was a severe, physical inscription of racial segregation on Baltimore's landscape.
St. Peter's lay on a dividing line between an affluent, white neighborhood and––to the west––a neighborhood with a burgeoning African American middle class. Apparently rejecting Bishop Paret's entreaty to stay, the congregation sold their building to Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and began searching for a new site. Unable to find one, the congregation merged with Grace Church the next year. Bethel A. M. E. Church continues to worship in the building at Druid Hill Avenue and Lanvale Street to the present day.
Grace Church (1850–1911)