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| St. Peter's Episcopal Church, Medford, New Jersey (courtesy Diocese of New Jersey) |
Address delivered by Rev. Cn. Valerie L. Balling at the Stations of Reparations service of repentance at Christ the King Episcopal Church, Willingboro on March 15, 2025. Text prepared by Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski and the Rev. Cn. Balling. It is also available under the "Who We Are" section of the St. Peter's website.
The worshipping community know as St. Peter’s in Medford began gathering in the 1860s, but was not formally established until 1874, on unceded land of the Lenni Lenape tribe.
Some of the founders of St. Peter’s, including at least Dr. L.L. Sharp[1] and Charles A. Haines,[2] were descendants of enslavers and their wealth, including a portion of the wealth they gave for the founding of St. Peter’s, was a product of slavery.[3] Though the well-known African American doctor James Still operated a safe house on the Underground Railroad out of Medford, there is little indication that many other Black people settled in the immediate vicinity. The presence of an UGRR site is more indicative of the surrounding being unsafe for Black people than the area being a place of safety and refuge.
The 1896 St. Peter’s parochial report, in the diocesan convention journal of that year, mentions a 50-cent donation for “missions to colored people.” This donation came, no doubt in response to the exhortations of Bishop Scarborough, who worked to make founding of Black ministries a priority in the diocese.[4] No similar donations are mentioned in any preceding year for St. Peter’s, and none are mentioned again for long after.[5] It does not appear that the congregation took up the persistent or significant concern for their Black brothers and sisters that Scarborough had hoped for and envisioned at that time.
Partial support for St. Peter’s in these early years came from a long-established endowed fund for mission to “the Pines.” The original donor intent of the funds was particularly for mission to the impoverished in the region,[6] which would include dispossessed native peoples and free African Americans. While there are some records and stories of outreach to “the Pineys,” the name given to the poor white people who lived rough in the Pine Barrens, it seems that the use of the funds for St. Peter’s may have departed significantly from the original intent as the locally elite and connected white families seem to have been the primary beneficiaries.
After World War II, massive changes began to occur in the patterns of development in New Jersey. The pattern of suburban growth in this period is referred to by urban planners, demographers, and geographers as “white flight.” The common racial restrictions in deeds and housing covenants prevented sale of property to Black people in newly growing suburbs, and even after these were formally and legally overturned, the racist practices of redlining, and steering Black buyers away from white areas was typical, especially in the outer, eastern suburbs and exurbs of the Philadelphia region. The new residents in these suburbs, almost without exception, were white people leaving racially diverse urban areas for racially homogenous suburbs.[7]
Medford and Medford Lakes were full participants in these patterns. Medford saw massive population growth, nearly doubling in size between 1950 and 1960, again between 1960 and 1970, and again between 1970 and 1980.[8] Before 2000 the population of the town was less than 1% Black in a state that was over 13% Black.[9] It is still less than 2% Black, a proportion that is obviously dramatically lower than the state average.[10] Medford Lakes experienced the same pattern of growth in the mid-20th century.[11] Medford Lakes is still less than 1% Black.[12]
St. Peter’s itself experienced this dramatic growth in the 1950’s as well, spurred by this pattern of suburban and exurban “white flight”. As St. Peter’s acknowledges on its website “in 1951, Bishop Alfred Banyard, of the Diocese of New Jersey, recognized St. Peter’s potential”[13] and he sought to support the growth of the congregation. Banyard himself was actively executing a formal diocesan strategy to cooperate with and benefit from this pattern of white flight.[14] During this period, when white Episcopalians were abandoning urban areas and Black neighbors, St. Peter’s, with staffing and financial support from the diocese,[15] and with the new infusion of white residents and white wealth,[16] engaged in a major building program that included the construction of a new church in 1957, a new Sunday school wing in 1959, and a new rectory in 1962.[17]
Since the mid-century, Medford has remained wealthy and white, which was reflected in the community gathered at St. Peter’s. A new sanctuary was built in 1992 due to the size of the congregation, which reached its peak around that time. Since then, as with many mainline congregations, membership has significantly declined.
During her 20-year tenure at St. Peter’s, much effort was made by The Rev. Helen Orlando, Deacon (retired), a member of the Diocesan Anti-Racism Commission, to encourage members to attend the diocesan anti-racism training. Most of those invitations were ignored or, in a couple of instances, met with hostility. At least one member left the church due to his disapproval at our advertising these trainings and defending our position by referring to our Baptismal Covenant. Other efforts have been made to engage in anti-racism work, including having a book study on Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste during the pandemic. However, such events are rare as most members of the congregation prefer to keep religion and politics separate.
It is speculated that the Dr. George Haines house was an Underground Railroad stop from 1826-1848 or so (https://theclio.com/entry/127153). However, this is unproven. It seems likely that Charles A. Haines (one of the founders of St. Peter’s) is one of his descendants (likely son) or one of his brother’s descendants (so, nephew), but the period during which the Haines family owned the house was more than 3 decades before St. Peter’s was founded. Incredibly, according to U.S. Census records (1830, as listed by the Northeast Slavery Records Index: https://nesri.commons.gc.cuny.edu) it appears that George Haines was still on the books as an enslaver during this period, enslaving at least seven people at a time (even though he apparently had a reputation as a Quaker abolitionist). It is unclear at what point the family stopped enslaving people, as the legal definitions of enslavement in New Jersey became so euphemistic in the decades immediately before the Civil War that it is hard to find accurate documentation. It is possible that his home was a UGRR stop but that he was not deeply personally involved and that he did still formally own slaves. There are other instances of men from wealthy slave-owning families during this period being known as “abolitionists” before they had ever actually freed any of the people their own family enslaved (e.g. James Parker, Jr.).
Walter Greason, Suburban Erasure (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), 173: “The southern counties in the rural corridor—Gloucester, Camden, and Burlington—avoided the most severe fragmentation and taxation problems due to metropolitan growth at the end of the twentieth century. The city of Camden continued its struggle to find a role in the global economy, but many of the suburbs in the rest of the county continued to attract new residents. Uneven development was most prevalent in the comparisons between small communities like Pennsauken and Collingswood. Burlington and Gloucester counties, on the other hand, only experienced the benefits of metropolitan growth over the last two decades of the century. While places like Woodbury and Mount Holly encountered some racial tensions when African Americans began to move into the suburbs, Medford and Woodbury Heights maintained high standards of living.”
