On February 22, the Cambridge City Council unanimously voted to designate St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church a Cambridge Landmark. This designation recognizes only a select number of individual properties that are important to the City as a whole, protecting them so that their unique qualities are maintained for the benefit of all the residents of Cambridge.
Located at 137 Allston Street in Cambridgeport, St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church is owned by the Trustees of The St. Augustine’s Mission. The church is also the home of Black History in Action for Cambridgeport (BHAC), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting programs focused on sharing Black culture, arts, history, and education with the general public. BHAC’s mission is to sustain and revitalize St. Augustine’s as a neighborhood center for assembly, empowerment, and outreach.
The property was originally part of the estate of Mrs. Washington Allston [Martha Remington Dana Allston] as drawn on a survey by William A. Mason and W. S. Barbour dated May 1, 1862 and filed in the Middlesex County (South District) Registry of Deeds, Plan Book 33, Plan 5. The rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Central Square, Rev. Edward M. Gushee, acquired the property in 1886 to construct a mission of St. Peter’s. Rev. Gushee died in 1917 and bequeathed the property to his son Richard, an Episcopal minister in California. A new priest was appointed by the Diocese of Massachusetts, but the congregation dwindled over the next few years and could not sustain the church financially even though Rev. Richard Gushee continued to own the property. In 1927 Rev. Gushee sold the property to Central Square furniture dealer Morris Bobrick, who may have intended to use the property for storage but who defaulted on his mortgage. The property was bought at auction by Nettie E. Fernandez who in turn sold it to individuals associated with the African Orthodox denomination in 1931. The St. Augustine’s property continues to be owned by the trustees of The St. Augustine’s Mission.
Allston Street was named for Washington Allston (1779-1843), an artist who pioneered America’s Romantic movement of landscape painting. He married Martha Remington Dana, the daughter of Chief Justice Francis Dana, who owned most of the property in this area. Allston Street is a through street parallel to Putnam Avenue and intersecting with the main thoroughfares in the neighborhood, including Magazine, Pearl, and Brookline streets. The neighborhood is characterized by dominant north-south streets, uniform intervals between the cross streets, and sustained setbacks. Only on four streets – Green, Franklin, Allston, and Putnam – can one traverse the entire area in an east-west direction. Early building locations appear to have been determined by land elevation or proximity to Central Square. In 1830 there were only three cross streets; in 1854 there were six; and by 1873 the current street layout was virtually complete. South of Allston Street is a slightly elevated and once heavily wooded area known in the 19th century as Pine Grove. In 1838 Edmund Trowbridge Hastings (1789-1861) and other Dana heirs laid out the Pine Grove subdivision with 131 house lots on Allston, Chestnut, Henry, Waverly, Sidney, Brookline and Pearl Streets. The original plan included a residential square around Fort Washington and another on Brookline Street that became today’s Hasting’s Square. Although some lots were sold, the area was too isolated to attract development even after the Cottage Farm (B.U.) Bridge was completed in 1851. Martha Allston’s land on the north side of Allston Street (including the site of St. Augustine’s Church) was subdivided in 1862 but remained substantially undeveloped until the 1880s, when the neighborhood began to fill up with one- and two-family houses. Construction of the Morse School in 1890 spurred development, and by 1910 the neighborhood was complete. It remains essentially unchanged today, although the school was demolished in 1957 and the site became a park.
From the founding of Cambridge in 1630 to the construction of the West Boston (now Longfellow) Bridge in 1793, only three families lived east of Quincy Street on “the Neck,” a marshy, wooded peninsula formed by the Charles and Millers rivers. The opening of the bridge spurred development. By this time two Cambridge men owned most of the land in Cambridgeport: William Jarvis controlled properties north of Massachusetts Avenue and Justice Francis Dana to the south. (Much of the rest – and all of East Cambridge – fell to Andrew Craigie.)
Jarvis was the U.S. Inspector of Revenue. Dana, who descended from an old Cambridge family and resided on a large estate on Dana Hill, served as Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from 1791 to 1806. The two men worked with the Proprietors of the West Boston Bridge to lay out Massachusetts Avenue and Main Street but did not otherwise develop a master plan for the area. Justice Dana developed his holdings slowly and carefully. In 1798 Jarvis was convicted of misappropriation of customs duties; the federal government seized his properties and sold them off to multiple owners.
Justice Dana died in 1811, and his heirs continued to develop Cambridgeport in the same careful pattern. What is now Allston Street was a part of Justice Dana’s estate left to his daughter, Martha Remington Dana Allston (Mrs. Washington Allston).
St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church was built in 1886-87 as St. Philip’s, a mission of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Central Square. The remote site was chosen to attract parishioners from the surrounding neighborhood who found it difficult to get to church in Central Square. It was the first house of worship to open in the former Pine Grove neighborhood and attracted so many worshipers that it needed to be enlarged two years later.
St. Philip’s was designed by the New Bedford architect Robert Slack, who oversaw both the original construction and the 1888 expansion and worked with the local builders Kelley & McKinnon. Talented and prolific, Slack did not specialize in one style; he designed private homes, churches, and institutions, including a new wing at Harvard’s Peabody Museum.
The church is reminiscent of an English village chapel but is distinctly American in its wood construction and simple expression. The exterior was shingled and stained dark red with trimmings of dark blue. The 50-foot-tall tower was surmounted by a gilded cross and enclosed a bell made at the Meneely foundry in Troy, New York. The main entrance was through a foyer on the right front. The interior featured an open-timbered auditorium with rows of cane chairs with hassocks for the congregation, double-hung windows with colored lights, and five decorative chancel windows high above the altar. The 1888 expansion involved cutting off the chancel end and moving it back 31 feet and building a section between with a transept on the south side, making the inserted section 31 feet by 34 feet. This increased the overall length from 60 to 90 feet and doubled the seating capacity to about 400. The basement was finished for use as Sunday School and guild rooms.
St. Philip’s was a personal project of Rev. Edward M. Gushee, who served at St. Peter’s Episcopal in Central Square until Easter 1888, when he became rector of St. Philip’s. A wealthy, generous man, Rev. Gushee owned the building, presided at services, and was the parish’s sole financial benefactor. Gushee died in 1917, leaving a small allowance to the parish but bequeathing the building to his son Richard, an Episcopal minister in California who apparently had no wish to return to Cambridge. The diocese supplied the parish with a priest for a few years, but the congregation dwindled and could no longer support either a rector or the building. In 1927 Richard put the building up for sale, advertising it as suitable for “storage, church or remodeled for dwelling” (Cambridge Chronicle, August 26, 1927).
In August 1928 Richard Gushee sold the property to Morris Bobrick, a furniture dealer in Central Square who may have used it for storage. Two years later Bobrick sold it to the trustees of a new church, identified in the newspapers as the African Orthodox Society. In 1932 the Cambridge assessors gave the trustees as George Alexander McGuire, Rev. Gladstone St. Clair Nurse, and Elvira Headley.
Bishop George A. McGuire (1866-1934) established the African Orthodox Church in 1921. McGuire was born, raised, and educated on Antigua; he came to the U.S. in 1894 and two years later was ordained an Episcopal priest. He served in numerous parishes and was praised for both his preaching and his organizational skills. In 1910 he attended Boston University’s medical school, but in 1913 he went back to Antigua to nurse his mother.
In 1918 McGuire returned to the U.S. and began to move in a new direction. He campaigned for equal rights for Black Americans and severed his ties with the Episcopal Church to protest its systemic racism and discrimination against Black clergy. McGuire became an associate of Marcus Garvey and worked with Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); Garvey in turn endorsed McGuire’s idea that true equality and spiritual freedom could only be achieved by an all-Black religious denomination – a church attended by people of color and administered by Black clergy. The bishop broke with Garvey in 1924, probably over the latter’s increasingly radical ideas on racial nationalism.
In the fall of 1921, St. Luke’s African Orthodox Church opened at 252 Green Street (now the site of the Green Street Garage). In 1931 the denomination took possession of the dilapidated St. Philip’s and renamed it St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Pro-Cathedral, with Bishop McGuire at its head. (A pro-cathedral is a church named by a bishop to serve as his seat but which remains under the governance of the vestry.) When Bishop McGuire died in 1934 the African Orthodox Church could claim approximately 30,000 members in thirty congregations in the United States, the West Indies, South America, and Africa.
General Sources
Cambridge Chronicle, June 6, 1887; September15, 1888; January 17, 1930.
Cambridge Sentinel, January 13, 1940.
Cambridge Tribune, June 18, 1887; January 28, 1888.
Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge, Cambridgeport. Cambridge Historical Commission, 1971.
Harvard Square Library, https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/cambridge-harvard/washington-allston/
Black History in Action For Cambridgeport, https://www.bhacambridge.org/history
Wikipedia entries for Rev. George A. Maguire and the African Orthodox Church
Archives
Cambridge Historical Commission. Survey file on 137 Allston Street
Cambridge Historical Commission. Biographical files on Rev. Richard Gushee Sr. and Rev. George A. Maguire
Middlesex County Registry of Deeds
Maps and Atlases
Bromley, George W. and Walter S. Atlas of the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Philadelphia, 1894, 1903, 1916, 1930.
City of Cambridge GIS
