The Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Portland, Maine: Memorial of the Month, May 2014 Before there ever was a cathedral: The TenBroeck Communion Set, by F. W. Cooper an article by Charles P. M. Outwin PhD, Cathedral Historian

the TenBroeck Communion Set, 1865 St. Luke’s church in 1857 Petrus S. TenBroeck St. Paul’s Church, c.1820 was a year of stupendous changes for the Episcopal Church in Maine. Our first bishop, Dr. George Burgess, died 1866 aboard a ship homebound from Haiti in April after a wonderfully successful apostolic mission to that island. The following July, Portland’s commercial center burned spectacularly, and with it the home of the city’s first Episcopal congregation, St. Steven’s (formerly St. Paul’s, founded 1764) on Pearl Street. Henry Adams Neely of New York was elected to replace Burgess in the late autumn, and began what was to become the longest tenure of any bishop of Maine to the present. Finally, St. Luke’s parish, founded in 1851 to serve the city’s fashionable West End community, and by then the most populous Episcopal congregation in Maine, was chosen to host a splendid new purpose-built cathedral. None of this was anticipated in 1865. For Christmas that year, a magnificent engraved “coin” silver communion set including matched chalices, a large wine flagon, and a paten were given in memory of Lucretia Loring Cutter TenBroeck (pronounced “ten- BROOK”, 1797-1861) a Portland native who had recently died in Iowa. They were produced by Francis W. Cooper, proprietor of Cooper and Fisher in . Perhaps the leading American ecclesiastical silversmith of the mid-19th century, Cooper was heavily influenced by the English Neo-Gothic movement. His works can be found in American and European fine art museums. Our own pieces, so familiar to us because the chalices are used nearly every Sunday, were donated not to this cathedral, but to St. Luke’s parish church, whose building (demolished in 1953) stood at 667 Congress Street. Thus, they are relics of our pre-cathedral past. Further, the name “TenBroeck” harks even further back to a time when the Episcopal Church in Maine, limited to a mere two parishes in Portland and Gardiner, was fighting just to survive. Lucretia’s husband, Petrus Stuyvesant TenBroeck (1792-1849, pictured above, whom she married in 1819) is one of the most significant figures in the early history of Maine’s Episcopal church. A native of Albany, NY, and from a prominent New York Dutch family, he was christened in the Reformed Church. He removed to New York City as a boy, and eventually converted to Episcopalianism under the influence of his Stuyvesant relatives. Petrus read theology under Dr. Nathaniel Bowen, then soon to become bishop of , and was subsequently made a deacon and priest in quick succession by that famous high-churchman, Bishop John H. Hobart of New York. After being rapidly promoted between parishes in lower New York State from 1816 to 1818, TenBroeck became rector of St. Paul’s, Portland in 1819. The congregation of St. Paul’s was in sad shape when Father TenBroeck arrived. It had already nearly folded three times, in the 1770’s, the 1790’s, and the 1810’s. It suffered first from persistent patriotic bigotry against all things British, and then from predations by the Unitarians and Universalists, Shakers, and Methodists successively. There were less than twenty communicants at St. Paul’s in 1819, and the parish had been making do with supply priests sent from for many years. TenBroeck subsequently became, at age 28, one of the two ministers who called the first convention of our Episcopal diocese in 1820, following Maine’s accession to statehood. He served St. Paul’s until 1831, by which time the number of communicants had risen to about sixty. He was then appointed missionary to Concord, New Hampshire in 1836, and subsequently served as the first rector of St. Paul’s parish there until 1846, when he resigned due to ill health. Having sold some inherited Manhattan real estate, he retired to North Danvers, , and occasionally assisted at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Salem. He died at home in Danvers in 1849, approximately 57 years old, and is buried at Harmony Grove Cemetery in Salem. Sometime after Father TenBroeck’s demise, the elder Lucretia moved in with her daughter (also named Lucretia) and son-in- law, New Hampshire lawyer and politician Nathaniel Bradley Baker, who was to serve as governor of that state from 1854 to 1855. In 1859 Mr. and Mrs. Baker, accompanied by Mrs. TenBroeck, migrated to Clinton, Iowa, near Des Moines, where Baker continued his law practice. He later became famous for raising and training volunteers for service in the Union Army during the Civil War. Mrs. TenBroeck passed away at Clinton in 1861, aged about 64. Adjutant General Baker died in 1876, while Lucretia TenBroeck Baker herself lived until 1900. It is not presently clear who donated the F. W. Cooper communion set in Mrs. TenBroeck’s memory, or why St. Luke’s was chosen over St. Stephen’s (as successor to Father TenBroeck’s parish) to receive the gift. All of this also serves as a reminder that it is not at all too early to begin thinking about the cathedral’s sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) celebration, beginning in 2016 and culminating in October 2027, and the diocesan bicentennial in 2020! Copies of the Memorial- of- the- Month features may be found at < http://cathedralofstluke.episcopalmaine.org/> Note: there will be a hiatus in the appearance of these pieces over the summer. They will resume in September 2014. Look for a new compendium of the 2013/2014 Monument of the Month articles, scheduled to appear in June or July.