Grace Episcopal Church is an active and historic Episcopal church in Madison, New Jersey, United States. Established in 1854, Grace has the largest membership of any parish in the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, with traditional "high church" Christian worship and a strong choral music program.
History
Grace Church was organized in 1854 as a daughter parish of St. Peter's Episcopal Church in neighboring Morristown. Through the 1840s, Madison's Episcopalians had worshiped in parishioners' homes and in the Odd Fellows Hall on Madison's Waverley Place. Some of the initial demands voiced for a separate parish came from Madison's African American Episcopalians. These included the Furman and Sylvester families, Margaret Quanto, who was on the parish charter, and the Sunday School –organized by 6 African American girls who had been asked by the Rev. Dr. Rankin to lead the congregation in music. Rankin had heard the girls singing at a nearby estate, and was so inspired by the beauty of their song that he asked them to sing at the Episcopal services in Madison. Grace was unusually diverse in race, status and character its early days, a leading sign that the parish's growth was a result more of the mixed community's genuine worship and spiritual interest in the music rather than pre-existing social groups (as was often the case with the other denominations). Grace, then, is a good example of the Episcopal Church's catholic nature in the United States, which in its beginnings did not restrict its ministry to one ethnic group or region but saw itself as the catholic and apostolic church for the new nation on the North American continent.
In 1855 a parcel of land was purchased and the foundation stone for the current building was laid on June 7. The long established Presbyterian community in Madison, wary of sacramental worship of any kind, and jealous of the popularity of the Episcopal services, initially tried to interfere with the establishment of Grace –but without success. Grace Church was also backed by the wealthiest Madison citizens including the Treadwells, Goulds, and the prominent slave-owning Gibbons family of Georgia. The new building was finished in 1856 and consecrated by Bishop George Washington Doane on May 18, 1857. While Grace, like the wider Episcopal Church, was officially silent on the divisive issue of slavery, the Civil War was understandably a period of unrest for the diverse parish –especially when William Gibbons left Grace Madison to fight for the Confederacy.
The rectory was built in 1874, and in the period between the Civil War and the 20th century, Grace evolved theologically, subtly embracing the High Church traditions of the Episcopal Church. Grace also changed demographically over this period, dominated by Gilded Age families like the Vanderbilts, Twomblys and Dodges. Grace became like "a private chapel for a few rich families" in the words of one parishioner.
In 1952, the local Twombly-Vanderbilt family sponsored the major renovation of the Church that defines the space today. The family purchased several Tiffany windows for the nave, including a memorial to Alice Twombly who died tragically in 1896 at age 16.