Our history
Easter 1865: how St. Mark's began
At the end of the Civil War, a group of Black Episcopalians in Charleston had no church to worship in. So they started one.
A city in upheaval
In the spring of 1865 Charleston was under Union occupation. Most of the city's white Episcopal churches had been evacuated, and the Black Episcopalians who had worshiped in and around them were left without a place to gather. Many came from the city's free Black community, tradesmen and families of means who had built lives in Charleston before the war.
Accounts differ on where they first met. Felder Hutchinson, a warden of the parish, remembered that they asked the city council for the use of the Orphan Chapel on Vanderhorst Street. Another account says early meetings were held in a member's house on Coming Street while money was raised for a building.
The first service
The first service of St. Mark's was held on Easter Sunday, April 16, 1865. At a meeting afterward the congregation chose its leaders: S. L. Bennett as chairman, J. N. Gregg as secretary and R. E. DeReef as treasurer, along with B. K. Kinloch, J. Wheaton, R. Holloway, S. O'Hear, J. B. Mushington and Lydia Frost.
St. Mark's is described as the first Episcopal congregation in South Carolina established independently by Black members, rather than started for them as a mission of another church.
A parish of its own
In 1866 the members organized as a self-supporting parish, meeting in a temporary building known as the Old Triangle on Alexander Street. The vestry and wardens applied for incorporation under an 1863 act of the legislature, and the charter was registered in Charleston on October 24, 1866.
Hutchinson also pushed back on a story, repeated in some books, that St. Mark's was founded by white slaveholders for their children of mixed race. In his telling, the people of St. Mark's founded it themselves.
Early clergy
A number of priests served the parish in its early years. Joseph Seabrook is named as its first rector, and the Rev. A. Toomer Porter, founder of the Porter Military Academy and the Church of the Holy Communion, also served. In 1881 Thaddeus Saltus, an assistant minister at St. Mark's, became the first African American ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church in South Carolina.
By the end of the century St. Mark's had the second-largest membership in the diocese.