Archives and History

James Lloyd Breck, priest, missionary and “Apostle of the Wilderness” is commemorated in the Episcopal Church’s liturgical calendar on April 2. Breck had a long and close relationship with Maryland’s Bishop William R. Whittingham, whom he first met in 1838 at General Theological Seminary, where Breck was a student and Whittingham taught Ecclesiastical History.

Several years ago, some controversy arose over whether Bishop Whittingham actually owned a slave. William Rollinson Whittingham was Bishop of Maryland from 1840-1879, and a native New Yorker. He was an adamant Unionist during the Civil War, but his views on slavery were complicated.

Through the centuries in the Diocese of Maryland, parishes have opened, ministered to the community, and closed. Some parishes established in 1692 are still flourishing; while some, begun in the twentieth century only remained open a few years.

A most interesting collection of early Maryland documents, known as the Callister Papers, has been housed in the Diocesan Archives since the 1850’s. Chiefly made up of the correspondence, business records and various manuscripts of Henry Callister and his wife Sarah Trippe Callister, these documents shed light upon life in a small remote village on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the eighteenth century.

The Diocese of Maryland’s 2020 Convention voted to allocate $1 million towards reparations for slavery, and since then several Episcopal dioceses and other church entities have been asking, “How did you get to that point? What did you do?”. To answer that question, we must go back to our history, delve into our past, and uncover a complicated answer.