Episcopal Deaconesses: C-L
Deaconesses main A-B C-L M-R S-Z
Clara Carter had a varied ministry. In 1902 she went to Alaska and helped to establish two hospitals, one in Skagway and the other in Anchorage. Later in her life she became the head of the Philadelphia Deaconess school.
Emily Cooper served as one of the early deaconesses trained and commissioned out of St. Mary’s Church in Brooklyn, New York. A forty-four-year-old widow, Emily relocated to her native Kentucky after her commissioning and, in 1880, became the first director for The Home of the Innocents in Louisville, Kentucky.
This Home provided a safe place for infants and small children who were abused, orphaned, or abandoned. Children whose parents could not rear them, because of the systemic pressures that created mass poverty, also came to live at the Home. Local hospitals and orphanages frequently sent infants who had been left, often to die, to the Home so that they would be loved in their final weeks and months. Many children were simply placed in baskets on the front steps of the Home. Regardless of how they arrived, Emily and the many women who worked there nurtured, cared for, and loved the children. She oversaw the creation and development of the first kindergarten in Kentucky.
Emily named the infants who arrived nameless. She created a community that loved them and protected them in a culture that too often saw the poorest children as disposable. She assisted at the baptism of almost three hundred of the children at the Home. And she cared for those who were dying until they drew their final breath. Under her guidance, the Home became one of the leading charity organizations in Louisville and remains a vital ministry today.
Two hundred and twenty of the children who died at the Home are buried, along with Sister Emily, at Cave Hill Cemetery. While records indicate the plots, most of the graves are unmarked. Two sculptures of Deaconess Emily mark the area. In one, she is holding an infant heavenward, and the infant is releasing a dove. The other is of Deaconess Emily shaking out a blanket with a butterfly pattern, with the butterflies coming to life and ascending to God. Its base has the names of the children buried in the plot, as well as an inscription to those children whose names are known to God alone. Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky, is her final resting place.
Blanche Henriques DeLeon, a graduate of St Faith’s/The New York School for Deaconesses, was originally from Washington, DC. Deaconess DeLeon served the congregation of St. Bartholomew's in Manhattan in the early years of the twentieth century. Later she left the Order of Deaconesses of her own volition, and entered the sisterhood known as the Order of St. Mary, where she took the name Sister Ignatia. She was named Sister Superior of the Trinity Mission House on Fulton Street, Manhattan, NYC in 1918.
Emma Britt Drant was essential to the establishment of the Episcopal Church in the territory of Hawaii, a place that the Anglican Church was also interested in evangelizing. Deaconess Drant learned Cantonese and was part of the founders of the Episcopal Church and Mission of St Elizabeth in Honolulu's Palama district in 1904. Drant later left for San Francisco where she began mission work among the Chinese and in 1905 called together a worshiping community to be called True Sunshine Episcopal Mission. After the 1906 earthquake, many residents of San Francisco, including many Chinese, fled across the bay to Oakland, and a second Chinese mission took root there. In 1910 Deaconess Drant relinquished her work in the diocese in order to move back East to attend to her brother.
Phyllis Edwards was one of the first women ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church. She was a civil rights activist who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and fought for the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church. She was ordained to the diaconate in 1965 by California Bishop James Pike. (General Convention didn't officially recognize women deacons until 1970.) A native of Chicago, Edwards earned bachelor's and master's degrees in education from Black Hills Teachers College in Spearfish, South Dakota, while teaching elementary school and raising four children. In 1962 she enrolled in Seabury-Western Seminary to become a deaconess. In 1964, after graduation, she was sent to work in the Mission District in San Francisco. 2009 obituary. ENS article: Diocese of California commemorates 60th anniversary of Phyllis Edwards’ recognition as a deacon.
Originally from New Hampshire, Bertha Garvin served at Grace Church, Manhattan, where she was the rector’s secretary and the vestry secretary for forty years. She first served under the Rev. William Huntington who had pioneered the deaconess cause at General Convention. During World War I, Garvin helped in organizing and serving Sunday dinners to sailors and soldiers who passed through the busy port of New York on their way to or from the European war. At the 125th anniversary of Grace Parish, Garvin was honored at a luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The guest speakers included Bishop William T. Manning of New York. More than 300 people attended this event. Garvin also served the greater community of deaconesses in New York City. She was president of the Alumnae Association of the New York Training School for Deaconesses in 1914, 1928, 1929, and 1930. She sat on the Executive Committee of the Association in 1923 and 1924. In 1940 Garvin retired to her home in Sanbornville, New Hampshire, where she died on 23 March 1945.
[from Deacon Geri Swanson MA Thesis]
Katherine Gilmore was educated at the Geneseo Seminary in Illinois and was set apart as a deaconess by Bishop David Greer of New York in 1905 at the Chapel of the Church Missionary House located at Fourth Avenue (Lexington Ave.) and 22nd Street in New York City, where she served for three years. She later served the congregation of St. John’s in the Rosebank/Clifton section of Staten Island. In 1910 she was employed as the housemother and superintendent of “The Shelter for Respectable Girls” in New York City, a temporary home for young women looking for work in the city. In the twenties, Gilmore moved to Rhode Island, and by 1932 she was in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Like many deaconesses before and after her, Gilmore was reduced to genteel poverty in her old age. She died on June 11, 1942. [research of Deacon Geri Swanson]
Born in Philadelphia in 1850, Jane Harriss Hall attended the Deaconess School there. She arrived in New York at the age of 45 and remained in the metropolitan area until her death. In New York she served as deaconess at St. Mark’s Church and the Church of the Transfiguration, commonly known as “The Little Church Around the Corner,” where she developed her love of theater, which molded her life’s ministry.
In New York she made her greatest contribution to the women working in the theatrical fields when she established the Three Arts Club, a place for struggling actresses to live while seeking work in the theater. Additionally she started the Professional Children’s School for child actors, established the Roosevelt Memorial House, and was a founding member of the Episcopal Actors Guild. In her later years she lived in Montclair, New Jersey. Two funeral services were held for Hall, one at St. Luke’s in Montclair, the other at Transfiguration in Manhattan. She was buried in North Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia.
[research of Deacon Geri Swanson]
Mary Sandys Hutton suffered from polio as a child and was unable to walk from the age of three. She ministered to folks in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Her ministry is chronicled in Ormonde Plater's book, "Many Servants". You can also read an interview with Deaconess Hutton here.
Susan Trevor Knapp, Diocese of NY, Head of New York Training School for Deaconesses and missionary to Japan. Susan Trevor Knapp was born in 1862. She graduated from the New York Training School for Deaconesses in 1894 and was consecrated deaconess at Grace Church, New York, in 1899 by Bishop Henry Potter. In 1903 she was made dean of the school commonly called St. Faith’s. She was a leader in both the American and worldwide deaconess movement. Because of a power struggle with the board of directors, Knapp was removed as dean in 1916 and offered the position of house mother. She declined and spent the next twenty-two years as a missionary in Japan, teaching English and Bible studies to Japanese and Korean college students. She returned to the United States in 1939 when Japan began to expel foreign missioners. She died in Los Angeles about 20 November 1941, shortly before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. [research of Deacon Geri Swanson]