Chapter One – Rev. Roger Searle: The Founding of the Parish

Long regarded by secular and church historians alike as the oldest regularly-organized Episcopal parish west of the Allegheny Mountains, St. Peter’s Church of Ashtabula, Ohio (1813-) figures prominently in the formative early history of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States (today’s Episcopal Church USA), the American branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Noted the Rev. Dr. James Moore, rector at St. Peter’s between 1872-1880, “The parochial organization of St. Peter’s has the precedence of all others (in Ohio)…, having been organized September 26, 1816…”

The Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States had its roots in England, formed in the Anglican Reformation of 1529, when King Henry VIII separated Britain’s Roman Catholic Church from the papal authority in Rome. The newly-formed Church of England retained the existing Catholic theology, liturgy, and structure under the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the English monarch. The church followed English settlers to the New World of the America, where they eventually founded the U.S. branch of the Anglican Communion, the Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church, a very prominent denomination among the nation’s founding fathers, was represented by more than half of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, including George Washington.

As the fledgling nation began to move westward from the original thirteen colonies, adventurous Episcopal clergy followed the trailblazing migration on horseback, offering sporadic services to frontier settlers – preaching the Good News and celebrating the Holy Eucharist with a log or stump as a crude altar. With the establishment of Ohio statehood in 1803, the great migration began in earnest in the Buckeye State, including the newly-opened lands of northeast Ohio’s “Western Reserve.” The move began in earnest to establish a more lasting denomination presence in frontier Ohio.

While regular lay-led worship services had been held in Ohio as early as 1803 at Worthington and 1808 at Boardman, Episcopalians in both communities were unable to provide financial assurances for support of a rector’s salary and church expenses, paving the way for St. Peters’ historic trailblazing role as the cradle Episcopal Church in Ohio and the Western Reserve – and pretty much everything west and northwest of the eastern Allegheny mountain range.

St. Peter’s Church traces its roots to Connecticut expatriate Sala B. Blakeslee’s enduring c. 1810 rustic log cabin on Ohio’s “Western Reserve” frontier in rural Plymouth Township in Ashtabula County. The Blakeslee Log Cabin, placed on the U.S. Department of the Interior’s prestigious National Register of Historic Places in 1998, is located just minutes south of the City of Ashtabula at 441 Seven Hills Road in Plymouth Township, immediately west of the Ohio 11 interchange.

Many of Ashtabula County’s pioneering families of the 1810’s – the Blakeslees, Halls, Harpers, Hubbards, Manns, Seymours, Upsons, and Warrens among 28 Episcopalian families settled on Western Reserve land owned by the Connecticut Land Company – were expatriates of Plymouth, Hebron, and Middletown, Connecticut. Many of these same families had been members of the Ashtabula parish’s namesake – St. Peter’s Episcopal Church of Plymouth, Conn., where founding Ashtabula parish rector Rev. Roger Searle (1775-1826) had been their beloved priest since 1810.

Beginning in 1813, the formative foundations of St. Peter’s, Ashtabula were laid when licensed lay reader began holding regular lay-led Vesper and Evening Prayer services, Sunday Morning Prayer services, and Holy Day services from the 1789 Book of Common Prayer for the small but dedicated group of frontier Episcopalians in various Ashtabula-area homes, including the rustic Blakeslee homestead.

Rev. Searle had been in regular correspondence with a number of his former parishioners on the Western Reserve, including Zadock Mann and Noah M. Bronson at Ashtabula. Having received commitments of sufficient funds to support a minister and grow a church, Rev. Searle in his correspondences assured his former parishioners that he was coming west to serve as a missionary priest to the Western Reserve, urging them to effect temporary organization of their parishes.

The groundwork for the organization of St. Peter’s as a parish of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America was laid at Blakeslee Log Cabin on Sept. 26, 1816 when Sala B. Blakeslee, Noah M. Bronson, Linus Hall, Harvey Hecox, Joseph Mann, Zadock Mann, Chester Porter, and Abner Scott wrote a formal resolution to organize the parish and pledged their financial support toward achieving that goal. Zadock Mann and Ziba Seymour were elected wardens, with Abraham Scott, Noah Bronson, and Warner Mann elected vestrymen. Shortly thereafter, Rev. Searle received word of the parish organization at Ashtabula and laid plans for his missionary pilgrimage to Ohio.

Rev. Searle, possessed of a great evangelical fervor to carry the Episcopal worship and doctrine into the newly-opened lands of Ohio following the decisive War of 1812, made an impassioned plea at the Episcopal Church’s 1817 General Convention for his frontier proposal. With the blessing of a sympathetic and supportive Rt. Rev. John Henry Hobart of the Diocese of New York, Rev. Searle traveled west, arriving in Ashtabula on February 16, 1817 with the intent of formally establishing a congregation for the group of Ashtabula Episcopalians, many of them familiar faces from Plymouth, Conn.

As he approached the Ohio state line, Rev. Searle asked his sleigh driver, a Mr. Talbott, to stop the sleigh on the state line as he made the Springfield, Penn. to Ashtabula, Ohio final leg of his journey. Rev. Searle kneeled down in the snow and, in the hearing of Talbott, who later relayed the story to parish rector Rev. John Hall, “put up a fervent prayer to Almighty God for the blessing of His aid upon the contemplated Christian…labors in the wide field which he was now entering, the greater part of which had hitherto lain untrodden by the foot of any clergyman of the church.’

Added former parish rector Rev. James Moore, “It was a prayer which Talbott afterward…said was more affecting…than any other religious experience witnessed by him.”

On February 19, 1817 (Quinquagesima Sunday), three days after his arrival in Ashtabula, Rev. Searle and his new flock incorporated “St. Peter’s Episcopal Church of Ashtabula, Ohio,” holding the first service of the newly-formed congregation in the downtown Main Avenue cabin of Hall Smith. Services were subsequently held in Ashtabula’s old Town Hall, located on the southwest corner of Hall Smith (North) Park.

Recorded Rev. Searle in his diary, “Without loss of a day I conducted services, read prayers in families, talked to individuals, consoled the weak, instructed the ignorant, and endeavored to collect the wandering sheep.”

The establishment of St. Peter’s, Ashtabula was a watershed moment for the Episcopal Church as the commencement of its expansion west across the Alleghenies into newly-opened lands of the American continent, including the fledgling State of Ohio, admitted to the Union in 1803.

Observed historian William W. Williams in his 1878 History of Ashtabula County, “The parochial organization of St. Peter’s has the precedence of all others…having been organized September 26, 1816.”

The parish has been located at its current downtown Ashtabula site at scenic South (Hubbard) Park, 4901 Main Avenue, since completion of the parish’s first church building in 1829. The original woodframe Gothic-styled church served from 1829-1963. The current church building, based on the beauty and simplicity of New England and Williamsburg architecture, was completed and dedicated in 1965. The original woodframe Parish Hall, built in 1850, was replaced with the current 2-story brick Parish Hall in 1923.

In addition to establishing and growing St. Peter’s, Ashtabula, founding rector Rev. Searle was an active missionary priest across a wide swath of the Western Reserve in Ashtabula, Huron, Lorain, Medina, Geauga, Portage, Trumbull and Cuyahoga Counties, establishing a dozen Episcopal congregations within six weeks of his arrival during his Western Reserve missionary tour, baptizing 178, and admitting 107 to Holy Communion. Among the parishes organized by Searle were those at Cleveland (Trinity, now Trinity Cathedral), Medina (St. Paul’s), Liverpool (St. John’s, since closed), New Columbia (St. Luke’s, since closed), Ravenna (St. Luke’s, since closed), Boardman (St. James), Norwalk (St. Paul’s), and Windsor (Christ Church, since closed).

While Rev. Searle was busy establishing congregations across northeast Ohio, licensed lay readers Zadock Mann, Noah Bronson, and Ziba Seymour conducted the worship services at St. Peter’s, Ashtabula in his absence.

Rev. Searle also spearheaded the establishment of the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio, following an organizational meeting of an April 1817 “provisional convention” at the home of Hon. Solomon Griswold at Windsor in Ashtabula County for the eight Western Reserve parishes he had organized in northeast Ohio, which already numbered some 146 families representing 90 communicants. Rev. Searle was called to act as president, while Rev. Philander Chase, newly arrived in Ohio’s Western Reserve from Hartford, Connecticut, served as secretary.

Rev. Searle’s parishes, joining with other newly-organized Ohio Episcopal parishes that had adopted the constitution of the Protestant Episcopal Church at Columbus, Worthington, Berkshire, Chillicothe, Cincinnati, and Zanesville, gathered at Columbus on January 5, 1818 to formally organized the Diocese of Ohio, the first diocese formed beyond the borders of the 13 founding states. Rev. Philander Chase, who would achieve acclaim as the great missionary bishop of the Episcopal Church, was elected as the Diocese of Ohio’s first bishop, consecrated in 1819.

Rev. Searle, who served St. Peter’s, Ashtabula as its founding rector between 1817-24, served as an itinerant supply priest until his death in 1826 at age 53, dying “universally respected and beloved.” He is buried at Ashtabula’s Chestnut Grove Cemetery, a few blocks from St. Peter’s, which is visible from the hilltop gravesite.