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• 1 media/Holy Trinity, Peru573.jpg 2019-07-17T12:09:16-07:00 Church of the Holy Trinity, Peru (defunct) 76 image_header 2024-09-17T17:29:50-07:00 On 2 May 1843, Bishop Jackson Kemper held the first Episcopal service in Peru, the county seat of Miami County. The first Episcopal Church was organized two years later and was named St. James, with the earliest baptismal records dating from August 1845 in Kemper's handwriting. The congregation's initial attempt at being recognized as a parish in 1843 had proved unsuccessful because its act of organization was imperfect. The convention ordered that proper instruction be given to the leaders of St. James as the correct procedure. The Rev. Francis H. L. Laird of Logansport assisted with the organization and conducted occasional services. Under the leadership of the Rev. Fortune C. Brown, a High Churchman who arrived in November 1845, the church held regular services above the store rooms of a local building. "He came here an utter stranger," parishioner John Mitchell wrote in 1895, "and by his Christian character exemplified in his daily walk, endeared himself to the citizens. Under his care the church flourished, and numbers of persons who had never witnessed the worship of the Episcopal Church became attached to its services."
  
  Brown began competing with the Presbyterian Church for members, which drew the ire of its pastor, the Rev. Asa Johnson. Complaining in 1846, Johnson wrote of Brown, "He is very bold and arrogant in his claims...He has been round among my members & given them tracts & told them they do not belong to the church." In another report, he said, "The Episcopalians are making great efforts...They are a mischievous people." However, Brown left for New York in 1850, and the church declined, much to Johnson's delight. By 1854, after several attempts by H. J. Rees, a lay reader who was not ordained, and several missionary clergy who spent brief periods in Peru, the congregation was abandoned. No baptisms occurred between December 1854 and October 1860, when Bishop Upfold recorded a single baptism while passing through town. Bishop Upfold appointed the Rev. Joseph Large, formerly of Trinity Fort Wayne and Stockton, California, to be a missionary in Peru in June 1857, but he declined to serve after being called rector of St. John's, Louisville, Kentucky.
  
  In 1870, through the efforts of Bishop Coadjutor Joseph Talbot, services resumed under the leadership of the Rev. Warren N. Dunham in the second floor rooms of a building at the northwest corner of Main and Broadway (the Rev. Edward J. Purdy of Logansport also conducting some services). Within a short time under Dunham's leadership, the congregation grew to 44 members. On December 9 of that year, a newly-reconstituted congregation formed under the name Trinity Episcopal Church, and on 19 September 1871, its leaders laid the cornerstone for a new church, a wood-frame building under a design by C.C. Haight of New York City. In 1872, the congregation dedicated the completed building and its "fine stained glass windows" that were memorials to Bishops Kemper, Upfold, and Brownell. A guild hall, financed by the church women, was completed in 1897 under the leadership of the Rev. Edward Averill. Averill, a strong Anglo-Catholic, introduced vestments at Mass and a vested boys' choir. He left to assume the rectorship of Trinity Fort Wayne in 1904.
  
  Sixteen years later in 1913, the congregation erected a Gothic Revival building of brick designed by William A. Otis of Chicago and located at 34 West Main Street. Leading the drive was the Rev. John Hamilton. During the construction, the town suffered significant spring flooding that greatly impeded the work until its completion in 1914. Cole Porter reputedly sang in the choir of the church, but his involvement is only a matter of tradition and not well documented. Other vaudeville stars reportedly attended the church during the time that Peru served as winter quarters for several circuses. In 1917, the parish received a $6,000 gift for a new parish house. On 6 January 1927, the vestry declared the parish to be free of debt
  
  The congregation thrived for much of the first half of the twentieth century and became one of the most Anglo-Catholic parishes in the diocese. The parish maintained a reserved Blessed Sacrament before the time that it became widespread. It also celebrated weekly Mass. During World War II under the leadership of the Rev. Clarence C. Reimer, the parish established a warrior shrine in honor of the men of the parish serving. The parish was known under the name of Trinity until January 1961, when, at Bishop Mallett's urging, the name was changed to the Church of the Holy Trinity, ostensibly because of too many other churches called Trinity in the diocese.
  
  According to a typescript parish history dated 1961, Holy Trinity's rector ministered to the large Bunker Hill Air Force base north of Peru, as well as to the city of Wabash fifteen miles away that did not have an Episcopal Church. The priests also served Greek and Ukrainian Orthodox churchmen in a spirit of ecumenism, with an icon of the Blessed Virgin hung the sacristy in reminder of that friendship. The church women organized the Circle of the Living Rosary of Our Lady and St. Dominic, which regularly prayed the rosary and hung a large wooden crucifix in the sanctuary. In 1957, the Rev. James Parker arrived from South Carolina, and the anonymous author of 1961 wrote in sanguine terms of the expectation that the parish "looks to a growth unequaled in the spread of the Faith" with a congregation "to whom the Catholic Religion is the very center of their lives."
  
  Parker remained at Peru through 1966, but the expected growth never materialized. The Revs. Lewis Payne and Russell Northway followed as rectors through 1980, after which the parish experienced an economic downturn. The Rev. Richard Kennison led the restoration of the organ in 1986, but there was growing dissatisfaction within the congregation about the direction of the national church.
  
  Holy Trinity's affiliation with the Episcopal Church ceased in the fall of 1990, when it voted to close due to recurring financial problems from withheld pledges. Average Sunday attendance went from 200 in 1959 to just 40 by 1990, and the building was in desperate need of maintenance. Many of its older members, coming from a strong Anglo-Catholic tradition, were upset by the ideological direction of the diocese, particularly with the ordination of women approved by Bishop Francis Gray, and adamantly opposed change.
  
  Later in 1990, the congregation reconstituted itself and voted to join the Anglican Church in North America, a conservative group that opposed women's ordination and other reforms of the late twentieth century and preferred to use the 1928 prayerbook. The building was sold to the new church, and it is now known as the Anglican Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity. Records of this congregation when still affiliated with the Episcopal Church are housed in the diocesan archives.
  
  Bibliography:
  
  John Mitchell, "The Episcopal Church, " in John H. Stephens, History of Miami County, Indiana, (1896) pp. 149-154.
  
  Clergy:
  Fortune Charles Brown, 1845-1850
  Frederick Durbin Harriman, 1851
  Henry Cook Stowell, 1854
  Warren Nelson Dunham, 1870
  Edward James Purdy, 1870
  Warren Nelson Dunham, 1870-1873
  John Henry Weddell, 1873-1875
  Andrew Mackie, 1875-1877
  David Lardner Trimble, 1877-1880
  William Henry Milnes, 1881
  Joseph Edward Martin, 1882-1884
  William Black Burk, 1884-1887
  Otway Colvin, 1889-1896
  Edward Wilson Averill, 1897-1904
  Adelbert McGinnis, 1904-1905
  Jean Weslau Armstrong, 1905-1907
  William Edward Morgan, 1907-1909
  John Matthias Hamilton, 1910-1915
  James Augustus Baynton, 1916-1918
  George Harry Richardson, 1918
  Edgar Thomson Pancoast, 1919-1922
  Arthur Worger-Slade, 1923-1925
  Jesse Raymond Lemert, 1926-1927
  Warren C. Cable, 1927-1929
  William Edward Hoffenbacher, 1930-1935
  Richard Dawson Taylor, 1937-1942
  Philip L. Shutt, 1942
  Clarence Charles Reimer, 1943-1945
  Frank Bozarth, 1946-1947
  Daniel J. Welty, 1947-1952
  Gail Colyer Brittain, 1952-1957
  James Parker, 1957-1966
  Lewis A. Payne, 1967-1975
  Russell Northway, 1976-1980
  Curtis Ross, 1980
  George Porthen, 1983
  Richard Kennison, 1984-1986
  Lloyd W. Holifield, 1986-1990
  
  Bibliography:
  History of Miami County, Indiana. Chicago: Brant and Fuller, 1887, p. 379.
  
  St. James Episcopal Church, Parish Register, 1844-1860
  
  Trinity Episcopal Church, Peru, Parish Register, 1872-1896
  
  Trinity Episcopal Church, Peru, Parish Register, 1897-1949
  
  Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Peru, Parish Register, 1950-1962
  
  Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Peru, Parish Register, 1962-1989
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 1 2020-08-01T06:31:52-07:00 Rev. Edward Wilson Averill 3 plain 2020-08-01T06:42:38-07:00
  Arguably one of the most successful and talented rectors in Trinity's history was its tenth rector, Edward Wilson Averill. At just 34 at the time of his arrival in 1904, he represented a new generation of leadership that would bring significant change to way the parish was administered.
  Averill was a native Hoosier, born in Elkhart on 13 March 1870, the son of the Rev. Martin Van Buren Averill and wife Rosette Badger (Wilson). His father had been rector of St. John's, Elkhart, and young Edward had grown up in the diocese. He had graduated from Northwestern University in 1888 at the age of just 18, and then enrolled in Western Theological Seminary in Chicago, being ordained a deacon at age 21 and a priest at 24, the earliest ages that these titles could be conferred. Upon graduation, he worked as a missionary in Illinois and as an assistant in Chicago before being made rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Peru, Indiana, in 1898. There he had served successfully in several diocesan offices under Bishop White and had married his wife, Carrie Brownell, on 3 June 1902. In time they would have six children, a son and five daughters, over the next decade.
  The new rector arrived in Fort Wayne on 29 May 1904, preaching his first sermon, in which he said he was available to meet with anyone in the parish at any time. He admitted he was not perfect and he urged his new parish to pray for him daily. "Find out my defects, not for criticism but for better working for God in spreading the truth."
  Averill took a more liturgical view of church work than either of his predecessors. From the beginning of his tenure he sought to raise the spiritual conscience of the parish with an innovative, High Church style, initiating weekly communion services at the 7:30 service and biweekly communion at the 10:45 service. He chanted Mass regularly, and though he abstained from some Catholic gestures such as crossing himself, he went to work daily in his cassock and labored hard to add more members to the communicant rolls. Some parishioners began calling him "Father Averill," and he accepted the new title, even though it had a more Catholic sound.
  The choir continued to grow and improve under the leadership of the Scottish-born chorister High McLetchie and organist Roscoe Siehler, both of whom had been hired in 1905 to rebuild the men and boys choir after it had suffered under earlier budget cuts. After they left the parish, Averill hired Alexander Barr, who was followed by Fred G. Church in 1908. Church was a particularly gifted musician, and the choir thrived under his patient leadership. Boys were paid a dime a week and were promised a week in the summer at camp, which became a major incentive for attracting new recruits.
  Averill might be described as Trinity's first modern rector. He worked to eliminate many of the practices of the previous century that had become arcane by the 1900s. He established a printing press in 1907 to print a regular parish newsletter as a way of improving communication within the parish. He printed its first parish directory. He established the annual meeting, pushed for the direct election of vestry members with fixed terms of service, and gave women the vote. He abolished pew renting in 1912 after a visitor was told she could not sit in a certain pew by a woman who owned it. The envelope pledge system dates from that period. He urged the vestry to hire the first curate, the Rev. William Wesley Daup, to help administer the growing parish. He encouraged women to take on more active roles in the parish and asked two to serve on the music committee when Fred Church was hired. He worked to make the church a more attractive place for socializing during the week, encouraging the creation of new social clubs and the formation of a Boy Scout troop. Funding for missionaries of the Episcopal Church continued to be one of his and the parish's favorite charities. Locally, he encouraged a group of Lebanese immigrants of Eastern Orthodox faith to join the church in the absence of a local Orthodox church. 
  The outbreak of World War One prompted Averill to take a leadership role among local churches in the war effort. He promoted the work of the Red Cross in the parish, and under Mrs. Averill's leadership, teams of women were organized to meet daily in the Parish House, sewing bandages, blankets, and pillows, which they shipped to hospitals overseas. Fred Church's wife, Margaret, went off to war as a professional army nurse. When the war was winding down in 1919, Averill and the vestry made plans to build a new parish house with a gymnasium and better kitchen facilities. The new structure retained the original exterior.
  By the 1920s, Averill made some members of the parish angry by insisting that they kneel during the reading of the Epistle during the service. Some began to advocate for Father Wesley Daup, the former curate, to replace him and began storming out in the middle of the service as a way of protest. Plagued by two years of deficits, the vestry deliberated on a course of action. Averill offered his resignation, which was accepted. Some members of the diocese hinted that Averill might be elected as Bishop Coadjutor to the ailing Bishop White, but the election did not come, and instead he moved to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, to become dean of its cathedral. He stayed there until 1928, when his health forced him to move to Phoenix, Arizona, where he became Canon to Trinity Cathedral there. He died there on 4 February 1948.