BROOKINGS – On Sunday, June 17, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Sixth Street and Eighth Avenue, Brookings, will celebrate the centennial of its church building and adjacent rectory. 

The festivities will highlight the unique history of the buildings and the people who worshiped and continue to worship in them. The community of Brookings is invited to a reception starting at 2 p.m. and a program at 3 p.m.

On the founding of Brookings’ Episcopal church, “There was a heartiness about the people which seem to me full of promise for the future,” said the eminent Bishop William Hobart Hare, first Episcopal Bishop of South Dakota. He was speaking about the Episcopalians in Brookings who wanted to form a church. 

Those “hardy Episcopalians” held their first service on July 30, 1893, in the Brookings G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic) Hall, but by the next year they had their own tiny, wooden church. 

In 1912, the Rev. Paul Roberts from Connecticut arrived in Brookings. Seeing the need for a new church, Roberts contacted a friend and architect in Boston. That friend was Ralph Adams Cram, designer of grand ecclesiastic works in the neo-gothic style. Architects for St. Paul’s Episcopal Church buildings in Brookings were Cram and Ferguson, whose plans for the church and rectory will be on display during the centennial celebration.

Easter Sunday 1918 saw the first service in the new, much larger brick church; the building was consecrated on June 19, 1918. 

Today, St. Paul’s has other unusual architectural and landscaping features, including two newer stained-glass windows, one honoring Native American culture and the other depicting a prairie scene with pasque flowers and butterflies inscribed with the words “faith, hope, and love.” 

Tours of the church will be available starting at 12:45 p.m. June 17.

Courtesy photo