The “Soul of the Thing” 175 Years Later

Saint James Maryland Marks an Anniversary

S
aint James School was founded 175 years ago. The College and Grammar School of St. James
was established by Bishop William R. Whittingham (1805-1879), the Reverend William
Augustus Muhlenberg (1796-1877), the Reverend John Barrett Kerfoot (1816-1881), and
others who were ambitious to have a premier Church school in the border state. The school is
located on magnificent grounds at Fountain Rock, an old estate in St. James, Washington County,
Maryland. Saint James is not far from Hagerstown and a stone’s throw from the Antietam National
Battlefield, the Potomac River, and the Shenandoah Valley. The School seventy-five minutes from the
Baltimore airport and sixty-five minutes from Mount St. Albans in Washington.

Whittingham was elected Bishop of Maryland in 1840. A native

New Yorker, he was most recently the popular Professor of
Ecclesiastical History at the General Theological Seminary. In the
manner of Wesley, Whittingham’s mother taught him the classical
languages and no little Christian doctrine. Too young by most
estimates he matriculated at the General without a Bachelor’s
degree. He was at the top of his class when graduation
approached, but the Professoriate informed the prodigy that he
was not eligible for the divinity degree. Whittingham persuaded
the examiners of Columbia College to let him stand for the
Bachelor in Arts. They were amazed at his learning and acuteness
Bishop Whittingham
of mind and made him Bachelor in Arts. The seminary authorities
followed suit and granted Whittingham the Bachelor of Divinity degree summa cum laude. The young
Bishop was utterly determined to establish premier schools in his diocese. He was larger than life. Tall,
deep-voiced, profoundly learned, and a brilliant preacher, he inspired men and women everywhere he
went. We cannot imagine the pain he must have felt when the Civil War destroyed the College of St.
James’s in 1864.

We must indeed count William Augustus Muhlenberg among the Founders of Saint James; for the school
in Western Maryland was the second iteration of Muhlenberg’s vision of an altogether new kind of school
in the North Atlantic world which he called the “Church school.” While Muhlenberg and his heirs heartily
subscribed to the view that there can be no such thing as Christianity in the abstract, and that the Faith

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must take root in one of its particular forms, they defined ‘Church’ in no merely denominational or
sectarian manner. In five states, Muhlenberg and his school-making protégés were captivated by the ideal
of the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” of the Creed. A “Church school” must always be a little
image of the Church, none other than the Body mystical of Christ in its academic mode. Such a school
will likewise reflect the social catholicity or “diversity” of the Church in the real world. This scholastic
ecclesiology (if you will) shows the influence of the Oxford Movement and Church Revival.

Kerfoot left Long Island for Maryland with Muhlenberg’s

coveted recipe for superlative schooling. He had been
Muhlenberg’s understudy for thirteen years and helped “the
Doctor” start the Church Institute in Flushing in 1828 and St.
Paul’s College and Grammar School in nearby College Point in
1836. Muhlenberg’s program on Long Island was much admired,
even by public-school leaders, and motivated students were
coming to Flushing and College Point from all over the Republic.
The late James McLachlan, one of the great historians of the
college preparatory school in America, wrote that many
ambitious educators tried and failed to create a school wherein
Dr. Muhlenberg the warm family feel and high academic standards could be
found in the same institution, but Muhlenberg had remarkably
little difficulty in achieving it. In the chapel at St. Paul’s, College Point, Muhlenberg preached Kerfoot’s
send-off sermon in late 1841. It was a sacred commissioning. Those present clearly understood the
initiative in Maryland to be the second step of a veritable movement in education that would in time give
rise to many American Church schools.

Hundreds of young men were transformed by Muhlenberg’s rich and interesting scholastic experience.
The
Doctor’s “school sons” were often so well prepared that they entered the third-year classes at Columbia,
Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Trinity-Hartford, and the University of Virginia. Students came
from as far away as Louisiana and Missouri to Muhlenberg’s schools in New York, and the same
reputation attracted them to Fountain Rock in Western Maryland. (Muhlenberg’s St. Paul’s was a thing of
the past by 1847.) Educators everywhere wanted to know the secret. Other nineteenth-century prep
schools were founded on the principles of Saint James: St. Paul’s, Concord; the Shattuck-St. Mary’s
School in Minnesota; Racine College in Wisconsin; St. Mark’s, Southborough, Massachusetts; and others.

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Educators in the Muhlenberg circle founded St. Mary’s Hall and West Texas Military Academy (now the
Episcopal School of Texas) in 1879 and 1893. Peabody of Groton, Diman of St. George’s, and Father Sill
at Kent all looked to Muhlenberg and company as the pioneers of a scholastic philosophy they perfected
in their own places and ways.

One poster-boy for Muhlenberg’s scholastic method was James

Lloyd Breck (1818-1876) of Bristol, Pennsylvania. A young
man of no guile but possessing legendary energy, Breck took an
average intellectual power to Flushing in 1832 when he was
fourteen years old. In five years, the Doctor, Kerfoot, and the
staff—indeed, the entire scholastic brotherhood—prepared
Breck for the junior year at the University of Pennsylvania. In
just two years he graduated magna cum laude with the Bachelor
in Arts in Classics. Breck went on to the General Theological
Seminary in New York, distinguished himself there, and,
inspired by Whittingham (at that time Professor of
Ecclesiastical History) and the plea of Bishop Jackson Kemper
Lloyd Breck
(1789-1870) for volunteers in the Army of God, Breck gave
himself to the work of a missionary educator on the American frontier. Professor Whittingham gave
Breck and many others in Breck’s generation a permanent reverence for the life and work of St. Columba
of Iona. The lives of the latter-day missionary educators reflected their inspiration.

Beginning in 1842, Breck founded a dozen parochial primary schools, four boarding grammar schools
(including Shattuck and St. Mary’s Schools in Minnesota), three undergraduate colleges, and three
theological seminaries in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California (Nashotah House, Seabury Divinity
School, and what became the Church Divinity School of the Pacific). The Mississippi Native Americans
trusted and loved Breck. His classical education gave him complete confidence that pagan hearts and
minds would receive the Gospel with alacrity. Muhlenberg’s school-son was a most successful missionary
among the Chippeway and Ojibway. Every one of Breck’s missions in education and church-building was
commissioned by Muhlenberg in the school chapel on Long Island. Breck idolized Dr. Muhlenberg, and in
some ways Breck was Muhlenberg’s beau ideal of what the Church needed in its school leaders. James
Lloyd Breck died in California in 1876, exhausted but fulfilled. A Galahad figure during his lifetime,
Breck’s untimely death in California drove Episcopalians across the nation into mourning.

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What fired people up so much about Muhlenberg’s schools? It is true that impressive alumni such as
Breck,
Kerfoot, and Coit make people notice a school, but illustrious graduates is but an epiphenomenon. Good
fruit indicates good roots. What was the phenomenon itself at College Point and Fountain Rock?
Muhlenberg had an idea that proved highly successful: In a worshipful and invigorating family
atmosphere— indeed a merry scholastic brotherhood—let the masters and scholars aim above academic
attainments alone: Let the entire community aim for character and each person in that fellowship will
gain not only character— growth in virtue, human strengths, and excellence in every aspect of human
nature—but an exceptional academic experience in the bargain. Muhlenberg discovered that a rich and
challenging course of study is not the end but a vital means among other means to the development of
character; and, if the academic program is given its proper place in a most comprehensive educational
scheme, even the average student will gain sound learning and the institution as a whole will achieve a
general academic excellence. Muhlenberg applied, as it were, the common-sense principle of the skilled
long-bow archer: One must aim high in order to hit the prized Target over the horizon. “The head should
not be furnished at the expense of the heart,” wrote Muhlenberg in 1828.

Muhlenberg’s contemporary Thomas Arnold (1795-1842) famously reformed Rugby along Christian lines,
but Muhlenberg was given the better opportunity since he started a school from scratch. The prospectus
for the new Institute indicated that Muhlenberg and his colleagues were up to something quite different
from the typical American academy or the old public schools of England. The epigraph on the cover of
The Application of Christianity to Education (1828), taken from a popular novel by Hannah More (1745-
1833), shows that Muhlenberg and his colleagues aimed much higher than what the rising public schools
and the typical catchas-catch-can academy were doing.
I call Education, not that which is made up of the shreds and patches of useless arts, but that
which inculcates principles, polishes taste, regulates temper, cultivates reason, subdues passions,
directs the feelings, habituates to reflection, trains to self-denial, and more especially, that which
refers all actions, feelings, sentiments, tastes, and passions to the love and fear of God.

Muhlenberg, Kerfoot, and their protégés were not, then, about to leave the complete and fulsome
education of children and youth up to chance. They favored great intentionality about every detail because
their philosophy was that the whole person must be educated and every part of human nature is to be
addressed in school. What kind of institution on which sort of campus and in what type of environment
can make such a vision a reality? To this problem they put much thinking. They had a keen knowledge of
every sort of schooling occurring in the United States and Great Britain, and they sincerely believed they
could improve the quality. The best education requires much careful planning and painstaking attention to
the location, physical plant, facilities, and daily routine. Seventy-five years before John Dewey,

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Muhlenberg understood that the school community is itself educative. (Remember that there were less
than 500 “high schools” in America before 1870. Boosters of the rising public schools in the USA looked
to Muhlenberg, Kerfoot, Coit, and others in the Muhlenberg circle to help them figure out what a
secondary education is in the first place. And this is the place to say that it were a great mistake to take
any Muhlenberg-type Church school to be an American copy of the English public school (e.g. Eton,
Rugby, or Winchester). Of course Muhlenberg’s school-sons were not opposed to borrowing what they
admired from the old English schools (Kerfoot saw the benefits of the class-form concept, for instance),
and all great schools will have certain practices and traits in common, but the Muhlenberg-type Church
school was something new in Anglophone education.)

Muhlenberg wrote in a catalogue of 1831, “Religion should never be held to account for inferior
scholarship.” In the Application, and especially in the scholastic republics which unfolded from the central
Idea, Muhlenberg shows how simple Christian principles can revolutionize the common life of a school
without religiosity. Sound religious ideals and practices in school – many of them quite indirect – can
condition a young person to be able to handle a multivalent course of study worthy of his time and efforts.
Henry Coit summarized one principal of the movement when he wrote in an 1891 magazine article,
“Religion gives the power to receive education.” The school-makers utilized state-of-the-art science about
teaching and learning. For their day, they were very progressive. For instance, their whole approach to
discipline was preventive and for the purpose of “inculcating principle” ( Application). Corporal
punishment was used only when a student asked for it in lieu of time-consuming extra chores or
grounding. The boys were allowed to choose their punishments from at least two options.

From the year 1818 at least, Muhlenberg had more than an amateur’s interest in education and schools. He
was the founding superintendent of the second public school district in Pennsylvania (in Lancaster) and
had been a director of the first (in Philadelphia). Muhlenberg made a close study of the most successful
schools in the United States, including the innovative Round Hill School in Massachusetts (1823-1831),
and was an expert about the revolution in education taking place
in Switzerland and Germany à la von Fellenberg, Froebel, and
Pestalozzi. Muhlenberg aimed for something more than “fine
literary institutions” (as he scornfully called them). It is ironic but
this highly refined Philadelphian loathed the very thought that his
schools might create and advance an upper class. Every tenth
student gained his tuition without charge. His aim was to have

Kerfoot
authentic scholastic brotherhoods that could produce able, effective, and thoroughly Christianized leaders
for the Church and the Republic.

Muhlenberg and Kerfoot’s motto could well have been: High standards and hard work in a helping
community. It cannot be doubted from the high standards established and often achieved in their schools
at College Point and Fountain Rock that Muhlenberg and Kerfoot meant business and a boy must arrive
with plenty of resolve; yet the extant sources make it clear that life with the Doctor and talented
subalterns such as Kerfoot was mostly enjoyed by the members of these highly intentional and
invigorating brotherhoods. Most students remembered the experience fondly ever after. And none
living the common life at College Point or St. James lost sight of the Model of school ideals: Jesus
Christ. Christ was regarded as at once the Master of the house, the Most Distinguished Brother and
Fellow of the college, and the Ideal Man to be emulated by every member of the school.

When Bishop Whittingham asked Muhlenberg to come and replicate his Church-school concept in
Maryland, the latter declined. He sent instead his dearest disciple, Kerfoot. The Reverend Theodore
Benedict Lyman (1815-1893) of St. John’s Church, Hagerstown, arranged for the purchase of the estate of
General Ringgold in Washington County. The fine manor house and twenty acres had been on the market
since the General’s death in 1829. (Lyman was later the fourth Bishop of North Carolina.) Lyman and the
Bishop raised sufficient funds to make the purchase. It featured the famous artesian well named by the
indigenous people Bai Yuka or “Fountain Rock.” The concept was that Kerfoot and a few companions
would establish the school and invite other masters and scholars into a preexisting fellowship of worship,
work, study, and formative companionship. Kerfoot and his colleagues would be “the soul of the thing,”
wrote Muhlenberg to the good Bishop, “and the body will form around them.” The idea was a household
of celibate men dedicated to the ministry of teaching and Christian formation. This Columba-like program
was very similar to Lloyd Breck’s “associated mission” concept on the northwestern frontier. Three
committed persons would worship and pray together, teach, share expenses, and slowly grow the
community on the soundest foundation: Christian brotherhood. (Kerfoot foiled the pure ideal when he
arrived at Fountain Rock a married man in October 1842.)

As with Muhlenberg’s concept, Kerfoot wanted to begin with boys thirteen or fourteen years of age whom
he could prepare in several years for his Bachelor in Arts course. (In antebellum denominational colleges,
most enrolled students were working in the “preparatory departments.” The number of students who
actually earned the Bachelor’s degree was smaller than assumed.) The academic session began around
Michaelmas (September 29 th) and ended in late July. The long vacation included all of August and

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September. The headmasters had good reasons to keep the scholars on campus for both Christmas and
Easter. They believed that these two major feasts provided incalculable opportunities to drive home the
necessity and the truth of the Gospel.

For all his intention to control the situation, Muhlenberg made it clear to Kerfoot and his other school-sons
that his was not a “system” at all but a way of life for which necessity could be the mother of invention.
While the daily routine at Fountain Rock was very similar to that established at Flushing and College
Point, Kerfoot felt the liberty to adapt the ideal to the situation on the ground. (Breck even added the
military discipline to his schools in Minnesota and California in 1866 and 1868.) The boys were up early,
washed up in the lavatory, assembled for the roll call, took some exercise, sat for breakfast, did chores in
the dormitory and on campus, went to chapel, then repaired to the Study to get ready for the three or four
Recitations of the day. The “Studies” preceded each Recitation. (Our “study hall” got its name from the
daily routine of these old Church schools.) There was a longer Study each night of the week except
Saturday, when, as on Long Island, leisure was enjoyed and something of a party atmosphere obtained.

One of the formative and permanently valuable trials of Saint James was that a student had to acquit
himself honorably in the Recitation Room. He would gather with other students. The teaching master
might ask his scholar to stand and recite thirty lines of Vergil in the Latin. This was the “memoriter
exercise.” Thence the master might ask the scholar to translate the Latin into the King’s English (which he
made himself ready to do in one of his previous Studies), or he would answer important questions about
the text. What is the Poet’s literal point? What else is he trying to say? To what situation in Roman history
might Vergil be referring? Why is it important to us – Christians living in the 1840s in the United States?
Anything the master asked a scholar to do in the Recitation Room required the young man to stand beside
his desk. He must form his thoughts well and speak with clarity. The work the previous night and during
the day in the Studies taught the boy will-power, discipline, duty, diligence, attention detail, carefulness,
and exactness. A student had to be resourceful. During his school days he would have scarcely realized
“the moral value of exact scholarship” (Bishop Westcott), but he was going to gain the advantage anyway.
It was a program designed to form character. The idea was that a boy would be molded into a man useful
to his country and to God.

The curriculum was robust. At St. James’s, the fulsome course of studies was de rigueur. As at
Muhlenberg’s College Point, John Kerfoot and his fellows added English literature, natural science, and
modern languages to the customary study of Greek and Latin literature, history, and philosophy. They also
studied drafting and studio arts. Theological and biblical studies were serious stuff. Graduates of both

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Saint James and St. Paul’s, Long Island, knew their own Anglican tradition well. Not the conventional
classical studies but the rest of Kerfoot’s curriculum was rather new in American education. The typical
academy grinded conjugations out of the pupils and left the extras up to parents and motivated individuals.
Several hours a day were given to vigorous outdoor recreation, including equestrian pursuits, hiking,
running, and gardening. (Both of Muhlenberg’s schools had easy access to Long Island Sound and there is
very good evidence that competitive interscholastic rowing was introduced in America, not by
Muhlenberg’s protégé Henry Coit at St. Paul’s, Concord, or by the Ivy League colleges, but by
Muhlenberg himself.) Rigor has to do with the relationship between a teaching master and his or her pupil.
Rigor does not come with challenging subject matter alone. Rigor is experienced in the way a teacher
relates to the student and whether a high standard is maintained at all times. A good school is “hard” but
not great school is not also a helping community. And these educators took it for granted that, if the
standards are authentically high and comprehensively so, then God’s divine help or Grace is essential. One
central principle of the Church school is that Grace is mediated in Christ to each member of the
community through each member. Each student pulls his oar and each student’s burden is lessened when
everyone in the boat is pulling together.

Kerfoot ensured that Sundays were as special at Fountain Rock as they were at College Point. After
breakfast but before the morning service, students were required to study the Holy Scriptures (usually the
appointed lessons for that day) and reflect upon them in a journal. Naturally, every member of the St.
James’s community was in the chapel for the divine service. Great pains were taken by Kerfoot and the
other clergy to make the liturgy interesting and impressive to the students. To begin with, the chapel was
made stunningly beautiful instead of the usual puritanism or nonchalance of the Episcopal Church in the
antebellum era. On high holy days and major festivals such as Easter, All Saints, and Christmas, the
appearance of the chapel changed dramatically; new graphics illustrating the theme were introduced; and
a vested school choir led the singing, a novelty introduced by Muhlenberg on Long Island.

The College and Grammar School of St. James never throve financially, in spite of the best efforts of both
Rector and devoted Bishop. One important reason for the lack of sufficient funds can be attributed to the
same challenge Muhlenberg faced on Long Island: the ugly sectarian squabbling among parties in the
Episcopal Church. Committed Episcopalians of one party did not want to support the Opposition. It is
clear from the sources that Muhlenberg and Kerfoot assiduously avoided party spirit, yet they were
suspect nonetheless. Since Kerfoot was closely associated with the High-Church and Bishop
Whittingham, the militantly Low-Church (and conservative) clergy and rectors of Maryland did not want
to support the College of St. James’s. Among stubbornly Low-Church partisans, Muhlenberg and

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company were declared “Oxfordians” who would make “Papists” of Protestant Episcopalians. They were
suspect for teaching baptismal regeneration, for occasionally crossing themselves, and for wanting more
drama in Sunday morning church. Muhlenberg was a marked man for his putative “ritualism” in the St.
Paul’s Chapel, and Kerfoot arrived in Maryland under a cloud. The fears of the traditionalists was not
assuaged when Kerfoot placed candles on the Altar in the chapel and used different colors to mark the
different seasons of the Church Year. And it was only too true that the Muhlenbergian school men thought
John Henry Newman someone special in Anglophone Christianity. Both Muhlenberg and Kerfoot read
Newman’s sermons to the boys at Sunday afternoon Vespers. History absolves them of any folly for
thinking Newman a worthy Christian to whom boys might listen for counsels in the Faith. The eight
volumes of the Parochial and Plain Sermons remain rich and fine fare for Christians seeking the complete
education.

In spite of the challenge to make ends meet, the academic reputation of St. James’s steadily grew and the
Rector became a much admired American educator to whom Cambridge University awarded the Doctor
of Letters degree honoris causa in 1867. By this time, Kerfoot was Bishop of Pittsburgh. He had lived
through the truly horrible ordeal of the Civil War, the closing of his beloved Saint James, and rectifying
Trinity College, Hartford. The Civil War drove Kerfoot and his companions away from Saint James to
other institutions where they made significant impacts.

In 1869, Henry Onderdonk (1822-1885) reopened Saint James. In an interesting turn of fate, Onderdonk
modeled Saint James redivivus on the school modeled on the original Saint James: St. Paul’s School,
Concord, New Hampshire. The New England school was founded in 1856 by two persons formerly
involved in the College of St. James: George C. Shattuck, M.D. (1813-1893), an ardent patron of
Muhlenberg and Kerfoot’s enterprises, and Henry Augustus Coit (1830-1895), a distinguished alumnus of
both Muhlenberg’s first St. Paul’s on Long Island and of Kerfoot’s St. James’s. Whether Onderdonk was
prepared by Muhlenberg cannot be determined from the sources. He was from an old Knickerbocker
family which produced two bishops for the
Episcopal Church. His ideals for educating boys seemed to be right in line with the Muhlenbergians. He
was very academic. Episcopal authorities in New York and New Jersey considered him bright and
promising.

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 Henry Onderdonk earned the Bachelor in Arts from Columbia
College then matriculated at the General Theological Seminary in
Manhattan. But the priesthood was not his calling. He withdrew
before earning the Bachelor in Divinity degree. Instead, the
young Onderdonk headed south to Maryland to assist the
Muhlenberg protégé Libertus van Bokkelen (1815-1889) in
starting St. Timothy’s Hall in Catonsville. (Van Bokkelen was
instrumental to establishing state-funded teacher training in the
state. He finished his career the first Director of Public Instruction
for the State of Maryland. A building at Towson University is
Henry Onderdonk
named in his honor.) Onderdonk left St. Timothy’s in 1861 to take
up the duties of President of the Agricultural College of Maryland, now
the University of Maryland. This New Yorker had Southern sympathies. In 1864, the President and his
wife Mary Elizabeth Latrobe Onderdonk (1836-1916) entertained a group of Confederate officers in the
residence. The College governors fired the President for supporting the Rebellion.

Henry Onderdonk’s dismissal was providential for Saint James. He proved to be a very talented school
man looking for a job. He must have realized that, when he married a Latrobe, he had put down
permanent roots in Maryland. He was still young and anxious to get his hands on another academic
institution. Bishop Whittingham let Onderdonk take over Saint James but warned the young scholar that
the diocesan treasury was depleted. He would be very much on his own to raise support for what he called
at first “the College of St. James’s School.” Onderdonk was up against a lot but was sincerely ambitious
for the school. He wrote Whittingham that the School would be a secondary school only and modeled it
on the already reputable St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. He presided over the School until
1895, when he died in office.

There were several interim headmasters until 1903, when the trustees persuaded Henry’s son Adrian to
leave the Gilman School in Baltimore to take the helm at Fountain Rock. While he did things very much
his own way in life, Adrian Holmes Onderdonk (1877-1956) was a successful headmaster who faced
enormous challenges with a mischievous sense of humor and total belief in the value of a Saint James
education. Adrian watched Claggett Hall, the main building, burn to the ground in 1926. Not long after he
raised the money to rebuild, the School faced the Great Depression. Enrollment plummeted, and, adding
insult to injury, a dishonest business manager made off with some of the brotherhood’s gold. Onderdonk’s
Memoirs show him a bona fide school man and an eternal optimist who believed a Saint James man was

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prepared both for Heaven and for a useful life. He enjoyed the close fellowship over which he presided.
He was able to recruit an excellent if small faculty.

It is noteworthy that the younger Onderdonk was an admired founding member of the prestigious
Headmaster’s Association. The wise and often candid Porter Sargent wrote to parents in the 1920 edition
of the Handbook of the Best Private Schools in the United States and Canada (page 197), “Mr. Onderdonk
is a man’s man, a strong and lovable personality, and a great teacher. A hero to his boys, he instills them
with the spirit of courtesy and of service. He intimates rather than requires what a boy is to do.” It is quite
clear from the sources that Onderdonk fils understood “boy nature” (Arnold) to an uncommon degree.

Onderdonk turned over his headship in 1939. Two interim headships followed. In 1955, Bishop Noble
Powell appointed the Reverend John Owens to serve as Rector & Headmaster. Owens had not been a prep
school boy and had not considered school work his special calling. But the quiet-spoken Headmaster had
some rare gifts. First, he stood four inches over six feet tall. He won Silver and Bronze Stars for
extraordinary bravery during the Battle of the Bulge. He was a priest of sincere, deep, and infectious piety.
The Bishop’s hunch about him was inspired. God prospered Father Owens’s work with boys and he turned
out to be a practical manager who did what was required to make the School strong. He would say to his
boys and to his staff, “All things come to the Altar of God.” Chick Meehan, an alumnus who worked at
Saint James for 53 years and served as Senior Master until his retirement last May, said of Father Owens,
“When he spoke, you stopped and listened. It was like God speaking to you. He taught me to be a man
and to be a good Christian man.”

Is it not interesting that the staunchly Anglo-Catholic and

rather traditionalist Owens humbly and effectively
modernized Saint James School? He reached out to a wider
demographic base than his predecessors had done. He
ensured that financial aid was strategically utilized to spread
the wealth of a Saint James education. It was on Owens’s
watch that Native American and African American students

Father John Owens came to Fountain Rock for the first time, and in 1978 he
admitted the first females. Bai Yuka would never be the
same. Father Owens built the new Chapel, the Cotton Auditorium, two new dormitories, and several
faculty residences.

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Without being reactionary or willful, John Owens preserved what was good about the School while gently
moving her into greater usefulness. How Owens was as a scholastic leader is illustrated by what he
advised Father Dunnan when the young man took over the School in 1992: “Don’t worry whether it’s
popular or not; just worry whether it’s right or wrong.” Owens served 29 years until 1984. Much was
accomplished during three decades, but Father Owens’s greatest accomplishment was to very admirably
maintain an intelligent, faithful Anglo-Catholic witness in one of the oldest Episcopal schools in America.

Can religion have anything to do with both the quality and the longevity of Saint James School? The
argument can be made that strong extract resists dilution. In every sense, Saint James was an ember
coming off the hot fire of the Oxford Movement and consequent Church Revival in Anglican Christianity.
The Founders were strong men, bold for the Faith, and valiant for the advance of the Episcopal Church as
a meaningful and successful Christian energy in the United States. They were progressive and sought to
overcome the status quo in the Episcopal Church. Muhlenberg denied he was “High Church,” even as his
more famous school-sons were happy to be seen as such. The Doctor called himself an “Evangelical
Catholic,” and we should unpack this apparently paradoxical idea if we would fully comprehend Kerfoot.

In Muhlenberg’s mind, the first half of the term Evangelical Catholic denoted little more than a real
relationship with the Lord Christ and the personal and “spontaneous” side of Christian experience.
‘Catholic’ denoted the hard bones of the historic Faith: sacramental Grace, sound doctrine, good
discipline, the apostolic ministry, and the perennial tradition forming curbs to keep believers on track in
their quest for truth. Muhlenberg’s direct disciples— Kerfoot, Breck, Coit—were High Church but not
Ritualists. They were Anglo-Catholics only in the way the North Woods creek is the Mississippi River.
They were not Anglo-Catholics if we make Anglo-Catholicism, Ritualism, and pro-Roman liturgics
synonymous phenomena. (Indeed, by this measure none of the Tractarians – not even Newman – was an
Anglo-Catholic.) The builders of the Muhlenberg-type Church school in America were convinced
Anglicans in the Catholic Christian tradition. They believed in Grace. They believed Grace is mediated in
Christ to every member of the community. How else can members of the school make the grade?

If the Onderdonks were High Churchmen in the conventional (basically Hobartian) sense, Father Owens
and Father Dunnan represent the flowering Anglo-Catholic tradition without apology. It takes courage to
be a great headmaster. Courage is formed in the face of adversity, neglect, and misunderstanding. Here’s
where the strong-extract metaphor becomes meaningful: During one of the most rapidly changing eras in
American history, when not a few boarding schools were throwing off much of their religious
commitment, Father Owens followed by Father Dunnan – two heads with extraordinarily long tenures by

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today’s standards – have stood rock-solid firm on “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” ( Jude 3).
This faith was solemnly handed over to them by older men and women they admired and trusted. Owens
and Dunnan have ensured that Saint James School is not a religious free-for-all. They have believed that
there is a place in the world for a prep school of inclusive, intelligent Anglo-Catholic witness. The great
spiritual strength of the School has guaranteed that it is welcoming and hospitable to young persons from
all over the world and from every background.

Like every one of the Muhlenbergian school men, Father Stuart Dunnan assumes that Catholic
Anglicanism works splendidly in a boarding school. As the current Chaplain of the School puts it on the
website, “We gather as a community each morning, regardless of our diverse religious commitments, to
remind ourselves that we are not alone. Education is not just about acquiring information, but about
becoming the kind of men and women of virtue who can, in the words of the School’s mission statement,
be ‘leaders for good in the world.’” Anglo-Catholic worship “is a strange new language for many in our
community, but one that many grow to appreciate, even if they remain firmly rooted in their own religious
(or even non-religious) convictions.” Since the volcanic eruption of that sincere piety, intellectual
brilliance, and warm devotion we call the Oxford Movement, the Anglican Catholic tradition has attracted
newcomers again and again all over the world. The prep school in Western Maryland is no exception to
the rule.

And it must be noted that twenty-two percent of the School is international. Mere pluralism is neither true
diversity nor genuine fellowship. A major donor recently praised the School for making diversity actually
work to the good of all concerned. “The secret,” he said, “is that Saint James is intentionally on the small
side. With so many daily chores and duties taken on by the students, they must cooperate with each other
and they do get to know and appreciate each other well. They become friends. What a blessing!” In this
“little image of the Church,” the students from all over the world do not divide into rival nations and
interest groups. There is remarkable camaraderie. It is real. The visitor to Fountain Rock experiences this
magic immediately.

The current Rector & Headmaster of Saint James School is in his twenty-sixth year. This is what’s
required to have a certain kind of school: plenty of time, total commitment to the mission vision, and an
abundance of faith. Since education worthy of the word must address the inside of a human being, it is
sometimes difficult to measure the success a great school is having with its students. Saint James today
excites every person who believes in the importance of realities that cannot be seen. This is not airy talk or
falsely spiritualized idealism. In fact, educators in the tradition of Muhlenberg and Kerfoot understand

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what every great educator in the history of the world has understood: Education gives power to the mind.
Education is not principally about information. The power of the mind cannot be formed and experienced
without attention to the soul. Not only saints but scholars are made from the inside. Hence all superlative
schooling is called “a moral education” and the high aim is for Character. All the other goals of education
– what Aristotle called the “natural goods” – are usually gained in the bargain. But in order to gain the
mundane benefits in the right way, the first aim must be higher than the goods of this world.

What we can see is that Saint James has never been stronger or more attractive. The daily life of this
merry academic fellowship in the Great Valley of America is very similar to what made the great schools
great in the first place. The standards are high but the whole purpose of the community is to ensure that
every student makes the grade. Each student is expected to do everything through the three trimesters. In
addition to dorm and refectory duties, there are sports, community service, and performing arts. Linda
Stowe is taking the Choir to altogether new heights. The community is not too large. Relationships
between students and teachers are caring and close. The daily routine is demanding but there is plenty of
recreation and free time before heads hit pillows at a decent hour.

What used to attract parents to the premier schools a hundred years ago is attracting them still to Fountain
Rock: a scholastic fellowship wherein a mysterious love grows boys and girls into men and women of
character. Persons shaped in this manner are actually able to make a difference in the world. Why should
we be surprised that Saint James is looking an awful lot like a very great American school? It is a fact of
history that many of the schools parents see as historic and great were originally modeled on Kerfoot’s
little school in Maryland. In any case, Saint James School still doggedly pursues the first purpose of the
Founders. Half an hour on the campus and one feels the attributes and qualities of a proud old school firm
in its mission. You will be greeted by confident and curious teenagers of high purpose, and they have not
lost their faith. The typical student will quickly engage you. Impressive and interesting teachers will
heartily welcome you to Arcady. The headmaster’s terrier will want to know you.

Saint James gets quickly into the blood. The vision of Muhlenberg, Whittingham, Lyman, Kerfoot, and
their companions is apparent all over the 800 acre campus. These men and women wanted a serious
Church school but with plenty of sweetness and light. This is what they got and still have at Fountain
Rock. One former chaplain of the School who was prepared at another famous boarding school, and has
worked at several of the best prep schools in America, said of Saint James a few years ago: “This is the
school we’ve all been looking for.” In any case, Saint James is a model Episcopal boarding school for the
21st century. It is an option worth investigating. Happy 175 th, Saint James!

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 Chip Prehn
XI-21-17

__________________________________________________

The Reverend W.L. Prehn, Ph.D., is Headmaster of St. John’s Parish Day School, Ellicott City, Maryland. He wrote the chapter on
Episcopal Schools for The Praeger Handbook of Faith-Based Schools in the United States (2012) and is the Editor-in-Chief of the
forthcoming 175th Anniversary History of Saint James School of Maryland.

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