THE HISTORY
OF
"THE CHURCH OF SAINT PETER IN THE GREAT VALLEY"

St. Peter's Church, in a photograph taken soon after the Civil War, shows the 1856 alterations to the original 1744 structure

William Penn received a royal charter from King Charles II to establish Pennsylvania  in 1681. The next year a group of Welsh Quakers bought 40,000 acres from Penn for ten cents per acre. This purchase, called the Welsh Barony, extended from what is now King of Prussia west to Downingtown, and was later to be divided into nine townships.

The township of Tredyffrin, in which St. Peter's Church principally resides, is translated from the Welch word "Tryduffrin" meaning "great valley". This Great Valley, where they had planted themselves, reminded many of the Welsh colonists of vistas from their beloved homeland; the natural conditions are strikingly like those found in the Welsh Border counties.

The first colonists within the Welsh Barony lived at the very edge of civilization. Twenty miles to the east lay Penn's infant Philadelphia. The Great Valley was a remote, heavily-forested and totally untamed wilderness. Communications with the tiny settlements was so rigorous that for years to come the Welsh Barony remained a realm unto itself. A sense of self-sufficiency, both of necessity as well as by choice, became the rule, and the Welsh language was the common (and official) tongue.

It was into this wilderness in the year 1704, as a direct response to the virtually un-churched condition of a large part of the British Colonial territory, that a missionary parish of the Church of England was established. Under the auspices of the Venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Christ Church in Philadelphia assigned "an indefatigable, clear-minded Welshman" by the name of the Rev. Evan Evans to lead this arduous mission. From this new outreach to primarily Welsh-speaking Anglicans would evolve the Church of Saint Peter in the Great Valley, and St. David's Church - Radnor (and later, to the north across the Schuylkill River, St. James Church - Perkiomen). A log chapel was built in what was considered a "central location" within the Great Valley, located south of the present town of Berwyn near the northeast corner of the intersection of the present Waterloo and Sugartown Roads.

However, with roads that were difficult to traverse long distances in the best of times, and often impassable even on horseback, there developed the increasing need for two distinct places of worship to accommodate the widely-scattered parish and its increasingly numerous parishioners. The Colonial clergy were few in number, and one priest was oftentimes forced to carry the burden of two, three or four widely-separated congregations. The 'Valley' inhabitants during the period 1704 - 1714 learned to depend mainly on lay-readers for regular Sunday services. Clergy would make irregular visits on Sundays or, more usually, visiting and preaching on week-days.

When the original log chapel was destroyed by fire around 1710, plans were originally made to replace it with a new stone church building. However, after much discussion it was decided that the physical characteristics of the parish mandated two places of worship. A new church, completed in 1715,  was built several miles to the east of the original log chapel and called St. David's Church. However, to serve the parishioners in the western portion of the parish, a new log church was built between 1711-1715 in the proximate area of the present church of St. Peter's.

This log church that would become St. Peter's lay at the 'upper' or north-western corner of Tredyffrin Township within an already existing burying ground at the crest of the highest hill within the middle of the Great Valley. It was common to build a church on ground already used as a burial place. There is a tradition that the old stone steps and mounting block north of the present structure, now standing alone and unrelated to anything else, once stood beside the door of the log church. The earliest recorded gravestone in the churchyard, long since disappeared, bore the date 1703. To the north was the lofty barrier ridge shutting off the Valley from the Schuylkill River, its steep hills divided where Valley Stream breaks through at Valley Forge. Two miles south of St. Peter's another high wooded ridge provided the opposing perimeter of the Valley. From the elevated vantage point of the churchyard "one could see rolling country east and west for many miles to either horizon".

The foundation for a permanent church building was laid in 1728. Construction was sporadic. What interrupted the work was most likely lack of funds. This unexpected lack of funds could easily be accounted for by the "remarkable exodus of the Welsh settlers of Radnor and adjacent territory into what is now Lancaster County". Named the Church of St. Peter, the new stone church building was built under the care of Richard Richison, Methiah Davis, John Cuthbert and Morris Griffith and completed in 1744, Architecturally it was very similar in design to St. David's, though somewhat larger. This 1744 construction forms the earliest part of today's church building. Pews were added in 1749, then an altar, reading desk, and pulpit in the following year.

From the original deed, granted by the landowner Methusaleh Davis to the parish in 1745, the purpose of the parish is "for use of members of the Church of England to perform Divine Services in and a place to bury their dead".

During the period 1714 and 1734, the congregations of St. Peter's and St. David's would be served by a succession of rectors:

The Rev. John Clubb  1714 – 1715
The Rev. Evan Evans, D.D.  1716 – 1718
The Rev. Robert Weyman  1719 – 1730
The Rev. Griffith Hughes  1732 – 1734

Then for three years the parish had no permanent pastor until the arrival in 1737 of the 29-year old Rev. William Currie. He arrived in this country as a Presbyterian clergyman from Glasgow, and courted a widow named Margaret Hackett who refused to marry him until he became an Anglican. He departed for England and returned an Anglican minister. The active ministry of this Scotsman as rector of St. Peter's Church in the Great Valley and  St. David's Church lasted until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War; after that, almost until the appointment of his successor in 1788, his pastoral care and concern for the welfare of his parishioners had an appreciable influence, to say the least, on the corporate life of the St. Peter's congregation.

As revolutionary fervor against Great Britain increased by 1776, the dilemma of Anglican parishes in general, and St. Peter's Church in particular, became acute. This quandary was exacerbated by the refusal of the Rev. Currie to renounce his vow of loyalty to the King, taken as a young priest years before. Considered a Tory by many throughout the parish, the confrontation between parishioners and priest became so hostile that Rev. Currie no longer had the consent of his flock to lead and thus resigned from active service in May 16, 1776. St. Peter's Church, now leaderless and politically torn asunder, officially closed its doors as a place of worship. The church's records indicate no formal election of wardens and vestry- men from April 18, 1775 to May 23, 1781.

The War became "close and personal" in September 1777 when the 15,000-man British Army, after a major victory over the Continental Army at Brandywine, marched the eleven miles north and briefly occupied the Great Valley. A Continental attempt to stem this British threat on the western flank of Philadelphia once again ended in tragedy and yet another defeat in what became known by the Americans as the Paoli Massacre. During the night of September 20-21, 1777 the British overwhelmed, in a particularly brutal manner, a Continental division under Gen. Anthony Wayne. Total American casualties exceeded 250 men. British losses were minimal.

How does this battle, fought only two miles SW of St. Peter's Church, affect our parish history? Details of the battle's aftermath, in what was at best a most confused combat, have always been sketchy. Tradition has long held that immediately after the Paoli battle, the British, viewing St. Peter's as a Church of England property, supervised the burial of a British officer, at least two other British enlisted soldiers, and at least five Continental troops killed in the Paoli battle. They lie buried side by side along the old west wall of the churchyard. Each grave is marked by a single fieldstone, with no inscription or epitaph of any kind, to indicate the British or American occupant, this perhaps to camouflage the British graves and thereby avoid the desecration that would have most probably occurred by Colonial zealots once the British Army had departed the Valley.

A map published in London in July 1778 depicts the battle lines of the Paoli battle which had occurred the previous September. This engraving, drawn by a British officer present at the engagement, notes St. Peter's Church as the most conspicuous landmark in the Great Valley even though the church's physical location was quite obscure and isolated. Historian Thomas J. McGuire, in his excellent book Battle of Paoli (Stackpole Books, 2000), believes that the church was given this prominence by the cartographer primarily for the benefit of those back in England for whom the map was intended; specifically to mark the grave of Captain William Wolfe, the commander of the Light Company of the British 40th Regiment of Foot, killed leading the assault on Wayne's Division.

Three months later, after the British Army had once again defeated the Continental Army at Germantown and occupied Philadelphia for the winter of 1777-78, the Continental Army under General Washington survived and regrouped within the encampment at Valley Forge. There is strong circumstantial evidence that the then-abandoned St. Peter's church building, situated less than three miles west of the encampment, served as a crude hospital for Continental soldiers during the terrible typhus epidemic of January-March 1778.

Minutes from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel describe Mr. Currie's, and the parish's, condition during the Revolutionary War period: "Having found it expedient to decline officiating in public ever since 1776, Mr. Currie has no account to give the Society, but that he continues in the performance of every other part of his function. He is hoping bills will be paid; if not his position is deplorable, as war has reduced him to very low circumstances. He has lost not only most of his substance, but likewise his wife, with whom he lived in his old age. They all died of camp fever and left him in the midst of the camp with one of the American Generals and his suite quartered in his house. He is left with three orphaned grandchildren, oldest seven, when parents died. He blesses God and he will die as he has lived, a true son of the Church of England even though he should have the misfortune to survive it."

Over the ensuing years St. Peter's Church in the Great Valley, one of the original parishes in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, was commonly referred to as "the Mother of Episcopal Churches in Chester County" because of its profound missionary work in establishing numerous congregations throughout the area. This church seeding took a toll on the 'mother church', however, causing dissipation of parishioners and funds.  By April 1895, after great difficulty in keeping up with the maintenance of the church, especially in the years following the Civil War, the parish regrettably had to "dismiss" Parson Henry Allen and dedicate all available resources to address the church's excessive decay. For the next four years, the parish was unable to sustain a clergy person, and was, in effect, closed for repairs.

By 1901, however, the Rev. Edgar Cope led the parish's resurgence, and the present parish hall was erected to accommodate a once-again growing congregation. Over its almost 300 year history, St. Peter's has been served by 38 missionaries and priests.

After a series of architectural modernizations (many referred to them as vandalisms) in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the church's sanctuary was exquisitely restored in 1944 to closely approximate the original simplicity and beauty of the original 1744 building. The original church building, and the adjacent burial ground, has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1976.

Today, St. Peter's Church in the Great Valley is one of the most active Episcopal parishes in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, and home to over 800 active members from all walks of life and spiritual journeys. It is, however, useful to reflect upon these words written in 1946,

"As one looks back over the long and varied history of this old Colonial parish, it is impossible not to be profoundly impressed by the inherent vitality displayed in the face of discouraging drawbacks. In spite of long periods when there was no rector and the congregation was entirely without pastoral care; in spite of serious losses by removal of parishioners to other neighborhoods; in spite of almost continuously insufficient care because of having to share one priest with one or more neighboring parishes; and in spite of the strength inevitably drawn away from the parent church at the founding of each new mission, St. Peter's has lived in abiding usefulness, through the blessing of God and the steadfast loyalty of those who have unremittingly cherished the foundation laid by staunch Welsh Churchmen more than three hundred years ago. With such a background, and with conditions becoming increasingly favorable, the future holds a bright prospect."

Come join with us as St. Peter's Church in the Great Valley creates yet another chapter of "nurturing people of all ages in the knowledge and love of God in Jesus Christ, and making Him known in the wider community".