A Founder Remembered, within Limits: St. John's Episcopal Church, Johnstown, New York, 2 September 2007

Not many people other than historians will go out of their way to visit Johnstown, New York, or its Episcopal church, St. John's. True, the countryside here, north of the Mohawk River and south of the Adirondack Mountains, about forty-five miles west of Albany, is quite pretty, but there are no compelling recreational attractions. Many once came here to buy gloves, but few leather tanners and glove-makers are left. Rose Knox's company, which taught the world to make gelatine from powder instead of soup bones, closed its local factory in 1975. The two largest employers in town today are not industries but social services. Johnstown now is a small city of 8,500, racially almost entirely white, with a median household income of $32,000, well below the state average. Its economic future, some residents suggest, depends on becoming a bedroom community to Albany. Johnstown's depressed housing prices may be a lure. But in late colonial America, Johnstown enjoyed renown and influence, mainly because of its founder, Sir William Johnson, one of the wealthiest people in Great Britain's fifteen American colonies. As the owner of a million acres of land in the Mohawk Valley, he controlled the only plausible access from the Atlantic seaboard to the Ohio River valley, and was a highly canny land speculator. He was the fast friend, trusted adviser, and business partner of the Iroquois, who lived along the river and mediated the trade between the Indians of the interior with Europeans on the coast. He had a successful military career and was politically well connected. He was a trustee of King's and Queen's Universities (later Columbia and Rutgers), and a member of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), the far-flung Anglican mission society. Colonial leaders were flattered to be invited to his country manor house, Johnson Hall. Visitors between 1763 and 1774 admired it not only for its beautiful frontier location but also for its elegant civilized comforts. They were fascinated by Johnson's remarkable displays of Indian artifacts, and they were intrigued by his own half-Mohawk personality-his Mohawk clothing and hairstyle, his Mohawk wife and children, his Mohawk manner of speech. They ate very well from local produce, farm animals, and game, provided from the labor of tenant farmers and slaves. Johnson Hall, a solidly constructed, handsome, two-story Georgian mansion, sixty feet wide and forty feet deep, is today well maintained for tourism by New York State. Johnson was also a devoted Anglican of establishmentarian style. Eager that his tenants as well as the local freeholders and Indians should be properly oriented to the king's religion, he erected a parish church about half a mile south of the manor house, in what is now downtown Johnstown. Through his connections with Trinity Church in New York and with the SPG, he was able to attract good clergy. Notable among them was the Rev. John Stuart of Pennsylvania, who proved to be one of the ablest of SPG missionaries in America. Johnson represents the last gasp of the effort to transplant to America a royally sponsored British episcopal church establishment serving a semi-feudal society. But he also represents an exceptionally progressive approach to crosscultural mission. In his day, Albany with its northern and eastern environs was one of the most culturally diverse places on the planet. Dozens of European, indigenous, and African languages and dialects were spoken here. Johnson had learned from the Jesuit example that the church should adjust its cultural assumptions, mission strategy, pastoral practice, and theological formulations according to the people to whom it was ministering. His views are best captured in a 1771 proposal for an SPG-sponsored mission to the Iroquois known as the Memorial to Lord Hillsborough (reprinted in E. B. O'Callaghan's Documentary History of the State of New York, 1854). Although written by the Rev. Charles Inglis of Trinity Church, the letter's main ideas originated with Johnson. …

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