St. Paul's Episcopal Church - Newport, KY
N 39° 05.557 W 084° 29.822
16S E 716467 N 4330037
Located in historic Newport Kentucky (just across the river from Cincinnati, OH), St. Paul's was founded on Easter Day in 1844 nearly seventy years after the first Episcopal missionary came to the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Waymark Code: WM515E
Location: Kentucky, United States
Date Posted: 10/24/2008
Views: 12
The following information was obtained from the church's history page (
visit link)
St. Paul's was founded on Easter Day in 1844, nearly seventy years after the first Episcopal missionary came to the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The Rev. Dr. Nicholas Hamner Cobbs, who was then Rector of St. Paul's Church in Cincinnati, helped "the Church-minded people in Newport" to organize their new congregation and the vestry considered him to be St. Paul's founder. Six months later Rev. Cobbs was elected Bishop of Alabama. In the autumn of that year the vestry bought a small brick church building on Court Place for $500.
In 1845 St. Paul's was admitted into union with the Diocese of Kentucky--two years after nearby Trinity Church in Covington. The two cities are neighbors, separated by the Licking River. Until 1849 the two congregations often shared a rector; however--as St. Paul's chroniclers are careful to point out--"its beginnings were independent of the Covington group and different in procedure."
St. Paul's grew steadily. By the eve of the Civil War, the brick church was enlarged, with a new tower and organ. Father Jeffries counted eighty-two communicants, and reported "the parish was free of debt in spite of a tornado in May that had blown off the gable."
Unlike other denominations, the Episcopal Church in Kentucky did not split during the war. St Paul's prospered and grew to a hundred by 1865. Eventually they needed a larger building. A later historian wrote, "By 1870...the political prejudices and antipathies engendered by that terrible catastrophe were largely removed; and Federalist and Confederates together knelt in brotherly love and good-will at the same altar."
In June, 1871 the cornerstone of the present St. Paul's was laid on the site of the old brick church. On a Sunday in August 1873, the bell in the tower first summoned parishioners to Morning Prayer.
The cost of construction rose from $19,452 to over $33,000; the church was consecrated in 1888. Although the congregation continued to grow (by 1894 it was the largest parish in the Diocese), the vestry struggled with debt well into the twentieth century. The church and its people have weathered natural disasters of every magnitude, including an earthquake in 1880, the record-breaking Ohio River floods of 1884 and 1937, and the tornadoes of 1915 and 1986.
By 1922 more growth brought a campaign to replace the corner office building used for many years as a parish house. Architect's plans show a three-story building, but the new parish house, put up in 1929, reached only two stories. The Great Depression followed, and once again St. Paul's found itself facing default on its debt. The vestry worked out a repayment schedule, but church finances were strained for several more years. The church women helped retire the parish house debt by operating St. Paul's Kitchen upstairs in the parish hall, where they served "home-cooked" meals to local businessmen.