THOMAS FIELDING SCOTT: PIONEER BISHOP OF THE AMERICAN NORTHWEST1 by Lawrence N. Crumb In 1853, the Episcopal Church chose Thomas Fielding Scott of Columbus, Georgia as its first missionary bishop to the Pacific Northwest. Who was this son of the Old South, and what was the nature of his new home and of his work there? The early years Scott was born 12 March 1807 in Iredell County, North Carolina, the son of James and Rebekkah Worke Scott. According to public member trees on Ancestry.com, the father died in 1809; several give the mother’s death as 1809, one gives 1814, and most give no date. (There are no official records, due to a courthouse fire in 1854.) If any of these dates is correct, it means that Scott was doubly orphaned at an early age. If he went to live with William Worke Scott, a much older brother, that could explain why William is given as the father’s name in a local newspaper article.2 At the age of seventeen, Scott entered Ebenezer Academy near Statesville, a secondary school run by Presbyterians; he joined the Presbyterian Church the same year and became an active member. He went on to Franklin College, as the University of Georgia was then known. At that time, it specialized in training for the ministry; when he graduated in 1829, he was licensed to preach in the Presbyterian Church. The following year he married Eveline Jane Appleby, a fellow Presbyterian who would follow him into the Episcopal Church. She was born 7 December 1 This article is an expansion of the article that appeared in The Historiographer 60, no.4 (Autumn 2020), 11, 15. I am indebted to Prof. Jack Maddex of the University of Oregon for valuable comments on the manuscript. 2 William S. Powell, “Scott, Thomas Fielding,” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (DNCB) 5:305-06 (for parents, following Iredell County Genealogical Society, Heritage Book (Statesville: The Society, 1980), 468-69; “Reminiscing,” Statesville (NC) Record and Landmark, 7 April 1949, 6, reprinting an earlier undated article. 1812 in Gainesville, Georgia, and they were married in that city on 25 November 1830. They would have three daughters: Jane, born in 1835; Lora, in 1837; and Sarah, in 1844 (adopted in 1848). The daughters disappear from public records after the census of 1850 and may have succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic that struck Georgia shortly after. That would explain why the Scotts were willing to relocate to the other side of the country. The daughters are conspicuously absent from Scott’s will, written in 1867, although it mentions nieces and nephews. We do not know how Eveline felt about moving to Oregon. She would have been grieving for her daughters, but she was willing to start a new chapter in a place where familiar things would not constantly remind her of them.3 Scott served several churches in Georgia and Tennessee until 1842, when he met Bishops James Hervey Otey of Tennessee and Leonidas Polk, Missionary Bishop of the Southwest (later, of Louisiana). They were both converts to the Episcopal Church, and under their influence he came to decide that the claims of episcopacy were true. (He had been unhappy with the Presbyterian Church because of a split in 1837-38.) He was ordained deacon in 1843 and priest in 1844 by Bishop Stephen Elliott of Georgia, serving churches in Marietta and Columbus. He later described himself as “conservative and catholic,” possibly the influence of Bishop Otey, whose “high and dry” churchmanship was widespread in the early Nineteenth Century. (In the United States, “high and dry” churchmanship meant an emphasis on patristic doctrine and the 3 Public member trees on Ancestry; census of 1850; email from Roger Allen, rector, St. James, Marietta, GA dated 18 January 2021 (for Sarah as adopted and her baptism; no other record of daughters); email from Breanne Hewitt, Georgia Historical Society, dated 16 November 2020 (for yellow fever epidemic); copy of will, dated 6 June 1867, in Washington State University Library. historic succession of bishops; it flourished in the 18th and early 19th centuries, without the later ritualism associated with the term “high church.”)4 Since Scott was from the Deep South, there is a natural desire to know how, if at all, he was connected to the institution of slavery. He came into the Episcopal Church under the influence of Bishops Otey and Polk, both slaveholders, but there is no evidence that Scott was one himself. He is not mentioned in the 1850 census of slaves; in the general census of that year, the entry for his household lists family members only. William S. Powell, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, wrote the entry for Scott in the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography. In it, he states that in 1852, Scott received an award from the Southern Cotton and Agricultural Society for an essay on “The Management and Treatment of Slaves.” The link in the online version leads to an essay of that title published that year by the Southern Central Agricultural Society, but the credited author is Robert Collins of Macon, a leading citizen whose name would not have been used by Scott as a pseudonym. In Oregon, he walked a fine line because of the large number of southerners who were sympathetic to the South’s “peculiar institution” and did not take a stand publicly one way or the other.5 The Pacific Northwest 4 James W. Fawcett, “Scott, Thomas Fielding,” Dictionary of American Biography (DAB) 16:501-02; DNCB 5:305-06; Thomas E. Jessett, Thomas Fielding Scott; Bishop of Oregon (Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1954); also his “Bishop Scott and the Episcopal Church in Washington,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 38, no. 1 (January 1947): 3- 17; his “The Episcopate of Thomas Fielding Scott, First Missionary Bishop of Oregon and Washington, 1854-1867,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 23, no. 1 (March 1954): 10-53; his “Thomas Fielding Scott: Bishop of Oregon,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 55, no. 1 (March 1954): 45-72; Robert Bruce Mullin, Episcopal Vision/American Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 5 DNCB 5:305, available online at https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/scott-thomas-fielding; the Collins essay is online at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011534463. Census information is available online to subscribers at Ancestry.com. The Pacific coast of North America has been claimed, at different times and with different latitudes, by England (later, Great Britain), Spain, France, and Russia. With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, France ceded its claims to the new United States of America. In the Adams- Onís Treaty of 1819, Spain ceded its claims north of the forty-second parallel, the northern boundary of California. Alaska was under Russian control until 1867, and an agreement between the Russian-American Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1839 established the latitude of 54º 40’ as the southern terminus. This left the territory between California and Alaska, known as “the Oregon Country,” to be disputed between Great Britain and the United States. The winning presidential candidate in 1844 campaigned with the slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight,” reflecting the doctrine of Manifest Destiny – a kind of secular predestination for the United States to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. (The later motto of Canada, “A Mari Usque Ad Mare,” expressed the same idea, but as a description rather than an aspiration.) The Treaty of Washington in 1846 settled the matter by establishing the 49th parallel, already the boundary farther east, as the boundary between the two countries in the West. When the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, it finally reached the parallel of 54º 40’, albeit from the other direction!6 In 1850, Oregon had a population of 12,093; Washington was only 1,201 (given together for Oregon Territory as 13,294 in the census of that year). In 1854, when Scott arrived, they were in the middle of a period of growth: by 1860, the population of Oregon, a state since 1859, had grown to 52,465; and that of Washington, a territory since 1853, to 11,594. Idaho, also part of Scott’s responsibility, did not become a separate territory until 1863. The Native American 6 Carlos A. Schwantes. The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 39-44, 96-99; Joseph Schafer, A History of the Pacific Northwest (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 128, 168, 216. population had declined from about 100,000 in 1800 to 30,000 in 1850, largely through the arrival of new diseases brought by White settlers.7 Transportation was still by steamship to coastal cities and by wagon trains and stagecoach overland. The Oregon Steam Navigation Company, formed in 1860, had a monopoly on river transportation; its principal freight was ore from mining and, later, wheat. The first local railroad was not until 1873; transcontinental railroads finally arrived at Portland in 1883 and Everett, Washington in 1893. A stagecoach between Portland and Sacramento was begun in 1860, and another connected Boise to Sacramento. A rail line from Portland to Sacramento was finally completed in 1887, connecting with the transcontinental trains that had arrived there since 1869.8 The commerce of the area was changing from hunting and trapping to settled agriculture, forestry, and mining. The fur trade era had ended in 1840, followed by a period of slow economic growth compared to that of the Midwest. Beginning in 1850, there was a gradual development of external markets for the region’s major products, those of agriculture, mining, fishing, and lumbering. Wheat became the staple product, such that it was legal tender for payment of taxes and court judgments, reminiscent of the role of tobacco in colonial Virginia. What little manufacturing existed was mainly to prepare local products for export, reflecting demands in California due to the gold rush, but also elsewhere, including livestock to Canada. There would be a noticeable expansion of the economy in the 1870s and 1880s, including the export of salted and canned salmon, but the foundation had already been laid.9 7 The Seventh Census of the United States, 1850 (Washington: Robert Armstrong, Public Printer, 1853), ix; Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington: GPO, 1864), iv; James Neville Tattersall, “The Economic Development of the Pacific Northwest to 1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1960), 43. 8 Northwest Power and Conservation Council, “Railroads,” https://www.nwcouncil.org/reports/columbia-river- history/railroads/, consulted 3 February 2023; Gary and Gloria Meier, Knights of the Whip: Stagecoach Days in Oregon (Bellevue, Wash.: Timeline Pub. Co., 1987), 23, 230: Tattersall, “The Economic Development,” 72-75. 9 Tattersall, “The Economic Development,” 31-85. Scott’s mission to the Northwest was the latest example of the Episcopal Church’s commitment to domestic missions. In 1820, its General Convention established the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society; the convention of 1835 declared all baptized members of the church to be members of the Society and elected Jackson Kemper as the church’s first official missionary bishop. Kemper’s territory included parts of the Old Northwest and places on the western bank of the Mississippi River.10 Other churches were also active in the New Northwest. In 1834, Jason Lee, the first Protestant missionary to the area, established a Methodist mission in Salem, Oregon. In 1836, Marcus Whitman started a Presbyterian mission at Walla Walla, Washington, where he died, with his wife and others, in 1847; the attack, by the local Cayuse tribe, is generally known as the Whitman Massacre. By the end of the 1840s, the focus of both missions had changed from the conversion of the Native population to being centers of population for White settlers and supporting their agriculture, industry, and other business enterprises.11 In 1838, François Norbert Blanchet and Modeste Demers established a Catholic church in St. Paul, Oregon, near Salem, where several French Canadians had settled. Blanchet became the first archbishop of Oregon City (now, Portland in Oregon) in 1846; his brother, Augustin Magloire Alexandre Blanchet, became the first bishop in Washington, also in 1846. The 1840s were a high point of anti-Catholic feeling in America, due to the arrival of Catholic immigrants from Ireland and the acquisition of Catholic residents in the territory annexed from Mexico; the creation of a 10 Robert W. Prichard, A History of the Episcopal Church (Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse Publishing, 1991), 127-28. 11 Robert J. Loewenberg, Equality on the Oregon Frontier: Jason Lee and the Methodist Missions, 1834-1843 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976); James W. Bashford, The Oregon Missions (New York: Abingdon, 1918); Patricia O’Connell Killen and Mark A. Shibley, “Surveying the Religious Landscape: Historical Trends and Current Patterns in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska,” in Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone, ed. Patricia O’Connell Killen and Mark Silk (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004), 42. second archdiocese inspired considerable opposition in addition to controversy within the church.12 Most of those who moved to the Pacific Northwest did not affiliate with churches of their previous denominational allegiance, and many may have come with the intention of avoiding organized religion altogether. For those not so averse, “religious institutions that offer emotional and physical experiences of the divine … have been attractive to people in the region in ways that more moderate Protestant denominations have not.” It was not the ideal soil in which to plant new Episcopal churches.13 Scott as bishop The General Convention of 1853 established the Missionary Jurisdiction of the Oregon and Washington Territories, and Scott was elected as its first bishop. Unlike William Ingraham Kip, who was elected at the same time for California and consecrated at the convention with several bishops taking part, Scott was consecrated at Christ Church, Savannah, on 8 January 1854, with only three bishops (Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina) participating. The identity of Scott’s nominator as bishop is not known. The bishops went into executive session, called Council, for the nomination and election, which are not described in the Journal of General Convention; more detailed minutes do not exist. The most likely person was Scott’s bishop, Stephen Elliott, who had ordained him and would preside at his consecration. Elliott mentions the event in his address to the next convention of the diocese but says nothing about the nomination. Scott’s 12 Edwin V. O’Hara, Pioneer Catholic History of Oregon (Portland: Glass & Prudhomme, 1911), 98, 132; Wilfred P. Schoenberg, A History of the Catholic Church in the Pacific Northwest, 1743-1983 (Washington, DC: Pastoral Press, 1987), 81, 92, 95; Maura Jane Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860 (Cambridge: University Press, 2018), 135; Patricia Brandt, “’A Character of Extravagance’: Establishment of the Second Archdiocese in the United States,“ Catholic Historical Review 89, no. 4 (October 2003), 704-11. 13 Patricia O’Connell Killen, “Patterns of the Past, Prospects for the Future: Religion in the None Zone,” in Religion and Public Life (f. 11), 12. jurisdiction consisted of what is now Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming; like Jackson Kemper in 1835, he was “the bishop of all outdoors.” Unlike Kemper, however, he had but small success in recruiting clergy from the East, and no success in having his territory divided. (Idaho was separated in 1867 and joined with Montana and Utah, but it was just as Scott was leaving.) 14 Scott traveled to Oregon with his wife, Eveline, by way of the Isthmus of Panama, but without the train across that was later installed; they arrived in Portland on 22 April 1854. He must have cut an imposing figure, over six feet tall and weighing 250 pounds. Hale and hearty at forty-six, he needed his strength for the long journeys by stagecoach over rough roads; on one occasion, he was thrown out when the coach overturned. He also travelled by horseback and canoe, when necessary; eventually, he was able to make the longer trips by river steamer. Thomas E. Jessett, writing a century later, described the trips to Boise as being “over roads and in vehicles unsurpassed for roughness and torture.” 15 Portland was the natural place for the headquarters of the new missionary district. It was still small, but by 1860 its population of 2,900 made it by far the largest city in the region. This prominence was due to its strategic location at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers, the two great trade arteries of the region, and its accessibility to ocean-going vessels.16 There were only two priests in the area when Scott arrived: the Rev. John McCartney, an army chaplain at Fort Vancouver in Washington, who also served Trinity Church, Portland; and 14 https://diocese-oregon.org/about/history/ (consulted 11 January 2022); Amy Evenson, Archives of the Episcopal Church, email dated 23-27 February 2023. Elliott later became presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America. 15 DNCB 5:305; Jessett, Thomas Fielding Scott, 22; his “The Episcopate,” 23, 42; his “Thomas Fielding Scott,” 66; his “Bishop Scott,” 16. 16 Tattersall, “The Economic Development,” 76; Table II-8, 77-78. the Rev. Michael Fackler, then living in Oregon City. They were joined in 1855 by Johnston McCormack, a deacon (ordained priest 1857) and in 1856 by the Sellwood brothers: John, a priest, and James, a deacon (ordained priest in 1860). A visit to New York in 1859 gave an opportunity to recruit at the General Theological Seminary, where four responded. One estimate of lay communicants in 1854 put the number at twenty, mostly in Portland. His first confirmation, on 20 July 1854, happened to be a woman whose husband, James Birnie, had been confirmed in Scotland by Bishop John Skinner, one of the consecrators of Samuel Seabury of Connecticut in 1784. By 1859, there were 79 communicants in eight places.17 Mrs. Birnie (née Charlotte Beaulieu) was from Canada and is described as “part Indian.” There were many of that community “from near and far” who attended two Birnie weddings on successive days, described as making a colorful contrast to the bishop’s black and white vestments. Although Scott arrived “prepared to face the horrors of Indian disturbances” – the Whitman massacre had recently taken place at Walla Walla – he does not seem to have interacted directly with Native Americans. In 1860, there was sufficient tension in the Vancouver area that the militia was put on alert, but Scott’s involvement would have been only whatever advice he may have given to the local priest. By contrast, the Rev. Mr. Willis is recorded as having organized a class for Native American boys in his Sunday School at the church in Olympia. They ranged in age from ten to sixteen years and were “excellent pupils and seem to have taken part in all the regular activities including the Christmas party.”18 17 Jessett, Thomas Fielding Scott, 7-8, 26-27. Information on early clergy and church buildings are in Scott’s reports to General Convention (Journal of General Convention 1856:281-83; 1859:336-38; 1862:236-41.) 18 Jessett, “The Episcopate,” 18-19, 29; his “Thomas Fielding Scott,” 48, 58. The bishop’s vestments had belonged to Bishop Jonathan Wainwright of New York, who died in 1854; they were sent in 1855 by the Wainwright family (70, f. 114). The size of Scott’s jurisdiction, and the difficulties in getting around, must have caused him to assume similar problems in another large jurisdiction. At the General Convention of 1856, his first as a new bishop, he introduced a motion for a new missionary jurisdiction consisting of the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, up to that time the responsibility of Jackson Kemper, bishop of Wisconsin and other parts of the old Northwest. The motion was adopted, and the bishops went on to elect someone for the position. However, the deputies failed to approve the jurisdiction, and there must have been great embarrassment. The debate included mention of the violence in Kansas as pro- and anti-slavery forces clashed over whether the institution would be extended to the territory. In a personal letter later that year, Kemper blamed Scott, calling him “neither a brother nor a gentleman.” Kemper claimed that Scott had made the motion without consulting him, although it was said at the time that Kemper had “signified his readiness to co- operate in any measures … judge[d] to be expedient” – said reluctantly, some claimed. Three years later, a new jurisdiction was set up for Kansas, while Nebraska was included in a very large one called “the Northwest.”19 The Civil War took its toll, both personally and financially, on the church in Oregon. The bishop had friends who were fellow-southerners and in favor of slavery, although the practice was outlawed in the territory. He was able to preserve peace within the church, partly because the national church had not taken an official position on the issue. He referred to the war only once in his addresses to Convocation (as the convention of a missionary district was called), and that was in 1861, at the very beginning of the conflict. He said, 19 Journal of General Convention 1856: 180, 192-93, 203, 208; Jackson Kemper, Letter to John H. Hopkins, Jr. dated 12 December 1856 (Morgan Library, New York, MA 367.102). Church Journal (New York) 4, no. 196 (30 October 1856): 318-19; no. 199 (20 November): 344 (the editorial mentioned in Kemper’s letter); no. 200 (27 November): 352; no. 201 (4 December): 359; no. 205 (1 January 1857): 392-93. I am indebted to Amy Evenson, Archives of the Episcopal Church, for providing these articles. Hopkins was editor of the magazine. We have confined ourselves strictly to our mission as a Church, leaving all political and social disputes where they properly belong – to the State, and to the progress of Christian civilization. Let us ever cherish a spirit of charity, of considered thoughtfulness of each other’s views and feelings … let us never import the disputes of others to mar our harmony. One of the clergy, James R. W. Sellwood, had been supported by churches in South Carolina, and this aid ceased completely, while aid from the North was diminished. Moreover, the Idaho gold rush of 1861 caused a decrease in population west of the Cascades.20 In addition to Scott’s work within his jurisdiction, he was also active outside it. He travelled to General Convention in 1856 and 1859, taking advantage of the 1859 convention in Richmond to appeal for clergy at the General Theological Seminary while in New York. He also officiated on occasion in British Columbia and California; an 1857 confirmation in Victoria was the first in that province, two years before its first resident bishop.21 The burden of serving such a large area became too great, and in 1862 Scott submitted his resignation; the House of Bishops asked him to take a leave of absence instead. In 1865, unable to attend General Convention, he wrote a long letter to the House of Bishops in which he proposed a division, with the western portions of Washington and Oregon under one bishop, and the eastern portions joined with Idaho and Montana under another. (This did not happen, although Idaho was separated in 1867, just as he was leaving.) The letter ends with a lament over the death of the bishop of Pennsylvania, Alonzo Potter, saying “I had fondly hoped to greet him 20 Jessett, Thomas Fielding Scott, 15-16; his “The Episcopate,” 31; his “Thomas Fielding Scott,” 53, 59-60 (quote). Sellwood and his brother John, also ordained, had come from England via South Carolina. 21 Jessett, Thomas Fielding Scott, 9-10, 11-12. DAB says that Scott “was called upon to administer the diocese of California,” no doubt a mistake for “administer confirmation in the diocese …” In July 1865, during the absence of the bishop of California, Scott confirmed 51, ordained one priest, and presided at the funeral of Bishop Alonzo Potter, who died on board ship in San Francisco harbor (Journal of General Convention 1865:222); Frank A. Peake, The Anglican Church in British Columbia (Vancouver: Mitchell Press, 1959), 21. within my own Diocese, and to share for once the sympathy & counsel of one of my brethren at home. But it was God’s will that I should only be permitted to read the Burial Service over his remains in a sister Diocese!” (Potter had died in San Francisco, having made the trip, ironically, for his health.) If there was a special bond between the two bishops, it may have been because Potter hosted the General Convention of 1856, Scott’s first as a bishop, and may have shown him some special kindness at that time. Scott’s letter appears in the convention journal, but there is a crossed-out section that does not appear: But your action three years ago is not forgotten. I allude especially to your unfortunate Pastoral; a paper not only unsuitable for any purpose of fraternal counsel to the members of the Church, but harsh in tone, partisan in character, & false in exegesis, & which will probably constitute a grave difficulty in the way of the resumed fellowship of former days. I pray that you may not be left to fall into a similar error now, when so much will depend upon a spirit of truth, justice & forbearance. “Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth.” Our motion should be to promote “peace on earth, & good will to men.” But I may not enter more fully into the subjects here alluded to. My feelings are too strongly [moved?] by a sense of the unutterable evils perpetrated during these years, & I think I could not bear to be an eye witness of the results. I rejoice that actual war has ceased; & I pray that all the fearful dangers yet besetting our land may be mercifully turned away, and the nation spared.22 In May 1867, Scott announced his intention to request a transfer to the East Coast, citing his wife’s health. Shortly after, he journeyed to New York with the intention of resigning, feeling that he had been a complete failure. Contracting a fever on shipboard, he died on 14 July, shortly 22 Scott to House of Bishops, letter dated 23 August 1865 (Morgan Library, New York, MA 369.128); Journal of General Convention 1865: 323-25. The potsherd quote is from Isaiah 45:9. after arriving in New York, where he was buried in the newer churchyard of Trinity Church at Broadway and Riverside Drive. Eveline returned to Georgia, where she lived with her mother for several years and died in Jackson on 12 July 1893. She wrote a biographical sketch of her husband that was used by the author of Scott’s entry in the Dictionary of American Biography, but it has been missing since at least 1947. The inscription on her tombstone reads “Mrs. Bishop Scott.” Thomas E. Jessett, the Episcopal Church’s premier historian of the Pacific Northwest, describes Scott as Deeply disappointed by the failure of the General Convention of 1865 . . . to provide him with episcopal relief, tired of the continual isolation from his episcopal colleagues now almost eight years long, worn out with the hardships of travel, and despairing of being able to meet the demands of his office in view of the constantly expanding population in his vast jurisdiction.23 Despite Scott’s feeling of failure, there were many successes, all the more remarkable because of the difficult conditions. These are described in their manifold nature in Scott’s entry in the Dictionary of American Biography, which also tells of Scott as a person: The district placed in his charge was extensive, conditions of travel were painfully arduous, means of communication were inconstant, money was scarce, and competent assistants almost impossible to secure… Bishop Scott was a man of great energy of mind and wide information. He was gentle in manner and spontaneously generous of spirit, but was capable of forceful and apt expression of his views. As a preacher he was popular in both the South and West. His vision 23 Jessett, Thomas Fielding Scott, 18, 25 (quote); letter to House of Bishops dated 23 August 1865 in Journal of General Convention 1865:323-25. Jessett gives the burial place as the old cemetery on Wall Street, but the foreword by Bishop Dagwell of Oregon correctly indicates the newer one. William S. Powell, author of the entry in DNCB, had given Wall Street in a 1955 article in The North Carolina Churchman but gave the correct place when writing for DNCB in 1994. https://www.ancestry.com/mediaui-viewer/collection/1030/tree/3361036/person/- 206766623/media/294c80c1-6766-4800-b1fd-ec083e02957d?_phsrc=xVg410&_phstart=successSource (for her tombstone; consulted 7 February 2023). was greater than his opportunity, but he is gratefully remembered for his pioneer endeavors and considered by many an authentic martyr of the American Church. 24 During Scott’s time in office, the number of communicants increased from about fifty to over two hundred; of clergy, from two to ten (eight in Oregon); of church buildings, from one unfinished to thirteen completed (nine in Oregon), two built at the bishop’s expense. Three churches (Trinity and St. Stephen’s, Portland; St. Paul’s, Salem) had become self-supporting. Spencer Hall, a church-related school for girls in Milwaukie, opened in 1860 and was administered for several years by Mrs. Scott, who shared in her husband’s ministry to that extent. Another functioned in Oswego [later merged into Lake Oswego], but both had to be closed in 1866 for financial reasons; a parish school in Astoria remained open until 1878. A diocesan paper, The Oregon Churchman, was begun in 1861 but ceased two years later, again for financial reasons. (It was revived in 1869; after several changes of title, it became The Oregon Episcopal Church News in 1989 and continued as such until it ceased publication in 2012.)25 Scott’s feeling of failure was no doubt due to the gap between overly high expectations and the harsh realities of the frontier. Moreover, he could not help noticing the gap between the fledgling congregations in the Northwest and the more established churches he had served in the East. But if the cup was half empty, it was also half full. There were many accomplishments despite adverse conditions. The story of Bishop Scott is the story of a missionary who was sent to a new field without adequate support and yet was able to make significant accomplishments. 24 DAB 16:501-02. The entry was by James Waldo Fawcett (1893-1968), prolific writer for newspapers and magazines, public relations officer for National Cathedral and other institutions. 25 Jessett, “The Episcopate,” 33, 44, 50-52; his “Thomas Fielding Scott,” 70-71. He left more than his vestments to his successor: he had laid a foundation upon which another would build.26 The Rev. Lawrence N. Crumb is vicar of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Cottage Grove, Oregon, and associate professor emeritus (Library), University of Oregon. 26 For Scott’s successor, Benjamin Wistar Morris, see Lawrence N. Crumb, “F.E.J. Lloyd and the Oregon Election of 1905,” Anglican and Episcopal History 81, no. 4 (December 2012): 415-18.