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St. Michael and St. George Episcopal Church

In 1912, Bishop Daniel S. Tuttle combined the gift of $40,000 from Miss Susan Mount of New York with Thomas K. Skinker’s offer of a prominent site in his projected Skinker Heights subdivision to create a new Episcopal parish to serve the suburbs west of the city.  Architect James P. Jamieson, a native of Scotland, had come to St. Louis to supervise construction of Washington University’s Hilltop Campus for the Philadelphia firm of Cope & Stewardson and remained here after the deaths of its founders.  This church shares the University’s red Missouri granite and subtle masonry craftsmanship, but it looks further back into England’s history for its 13th-century Gothic style.  The carvings of cherubs seen on the corbels refer to the original dedication of the church to St. Michael and All Angels in 1912.  The Skinker family played such an active roll in the new parish that the neighbors called it St. Michael and All Skinkers.

In 1928 St. Michael’s merged with St. George’s, an older parish organized in 1845 that moved here from its 1891 building at Olive and Newstead (now St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church).  To accommodate the fast-growing membership, the building was greatly enlarged under the direction of Walter Rathmann of Klipstein & Rathmann, a firm that focused on industrial and civic work such as the Civil Courts Building but is best known today for the Bevo Mill.  Rathmann was a member of the congregation and lived a few doors away at 6424 Cecil.  The church was expanded in two directions with three extra bays and a large tower to the west and an extra area for the choir inserted between the crossing and the altar area or ‘sanctuary.’  The 1700-ton auditorium wing was turned on rollers to parallel Wydown rather than Ellenwood, a major engineering feat for the era.

Following this work, the first stained glass was installed in 1930 behind the altar, designed by Emil Frei’s Munich studios.  Frei contributed 25 more sets of windows over the years, the last in 1979, moving their production to St. Louis in 1937.  From 1947 to 1963, Charles J. Connick Associates of Boston created 17 sets of windows, mainly in the nave.  The second pair of windows from the crossing on the left shows Solomon building the first temple and Ezra the second, an apt memorial to Walter Rathmann.  The four Service Men’s windows at the back of the nave were installed in 1948 as a World War II memorial and are the work of W.H. Burnham, another Boston firm.  A second architect is commemorated in St. Mary’s Chapel off the south transept, which Arthur E. Koelle created from the former vestry as part of the 1928 renovations.  Koelle worked with Rathmann and in the successor firm, and in 1988 the chapel was restored in his and his wife’s memory.

The buildings have continued to evolve.  The auditorium wing was converted into the Great Hall in 1973, with a picture of Bishop Tuttle over the fireplace.  The Garden Cloister west of the tower on the Ellenwood side is a columbarium created in the 1980s.  St. George’s Chapel on the Wydown side to designs by Louis R. Saur and Associates was dedicated in 1998.

October 2006 marks the first visit to the church by the Chamber Chorus.