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Saint James Episcopal Church

172 Ottawa Street
518-668-2001

History:

The earliest Anglican worship services in this area were held in Granville, Whitehall and Ticonderoga, by chaplains in the English Army. No record has been found of Anglican chaplains serving at Fort William Henry. Early in the nineteenth century, Philander Chase, an Albany native and a seminarian at the General Theological Seminary in New York, held at least one service in the Lake George area as he traveled to Thurman to set up a summer chapel. Chase later became Bishop of Ohio, then Illinois, and also was the founder of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

The first continuous Episcopal worship was a gathering of Lake George family and friends on the porch of the Rev. Isaac Tuttle's summer home, Rockledge, in 1852. Mr. Tuttle was a well known New York City priest and rector of St. Luke's parish. In 1855, the services had become established and were moved to the Old Court House (now the Lake George Historical Museum on Canada Street) and the first Parish meeting was held there on the first Sunday evening of August in 1855.

Church members attending that meeting assumed that the parish would be named St. Luke's, but when Mr. Tuttle arrived, after rowing from Rockledge, he described the beauty of the scenery as he rowed and said that all he could think of was the passage from the Epistle.

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