Endicott Peabody

Early life and family

Peabody was born in Salem, Massachusetts on either May 30 or 31, 1857 to Samuel Endicott Peabody and Marianne Cabot Lee. He had three brothers and one sister: John, a banker; Francis, a lawyer; Martha, who married into a prominent family in Groton, Massachusetts; and George, a banker.

The Peabodys were "one of the oldest Massachusetts families." Lt. Francis Peabody moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts in 1635, fifteen years after the first landing at Plymouth Rock. Endicott's great-grandfather was Salem shipowner and privateer Joseph Peabody, who made a fortune importing pepper from Sumatra, and was one of the wealthiest men in the United States when he died in 1844. Through his paternal grandmother he was descended from Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Endecott, who founded Salem in 1628.

Due to his lineage, Peabody grew up extremely well-connected. His father was a Boston merchant and an associate of J. P. Morgan. His mother was the daughter of John Clarke Lee, the founder of the financial firm Lee, Higginson & Co. His cousin was Alice Hathaway Lee, the first wife of President Theodore Roosevelt; Peabody was an usher at their wedding.

In 1885, Peabody married his first cousin, Fannie Peabody, daughter of Francis (Samuel's brother) and Helen (Bloodgood) Peabody. They had six children. His son Malcolm E. Peabody was bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York. His grandchildren included Massachusetts governor Endicott H. Peabody and UNCHR representative Marietta Peabody Tree. His great-grandchildren include author Frances FitzGerald, model Penelope Tree, and actress Kyra Sedgwick.

Peabody was an active part of the independent school community. He founded Brooks School in 1926 in memory of his mentor Phillips Brooks, who died in 1893; he also chaired its board of trustees. He provided important early support to Baguio School in the Philippines, lending it a faculty member and sending his son Malcolm to teach there. He also served as a trustee of Lawrence Academy at Groton from 1884 to 1908.

Peabody was elected to the American Antiquarian Society in 1891 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1918. He received honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale. In 1889, the Columbia University board asked him to apply for the Columbia presidency, but he declined.

Seminary and early ministry

Having tried out law and finance and lost interest in both, Peabody went to Trinity Church rector Phillips Brooks for advice. Brooks encouraged him to attend the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a stronghold of the Broad Church tendency in the American Episcopal Church. Brooks believed that ETS taught its students to be "eager to train its men to think and reason," and "anxious to blend the most earnest piety with the most active intelligence." Peabody graduated from ETS in 1884.

As a seminarian, Peabody assisted the liberal theologian Leighton Parks at Emmanuel Church in Back Bay; Parks gave him the idea of working at a prep school. (Peabody later repaid Parks by placing him on the Groton School board of trustees and inviting him to give the school's commencement address three times.) He was also heavily influenced by F. W. Robertson, who Stopford Brooke described as "partly a prophet of the old, partly of the new."

Ministry in Arizona

After his first semester of classes, Peabody was invited to take charge of a fledgling Episcopal congregation in Tombstone, Arizona. He arrived in January 1882, three months after the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Though Peabody felt unqualified, his stay in Tombstone proved that he could attract donors and manage a congregation, two traits he employed to great effect in his educational career. Within months, he raised $5,000 to build St. Paul's Episcopal Church. It opened on June 18, 1882, making it the oldest Protestant church building in Arizona. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.

To build up the congregation and raise money, Peabody visited up to 15 homes a day. It is said that he visited saloons to ask gamblers for donations and "would challenge locals to boxing matches on the condition that if he won, they had to come to church on Sunday," although Peabody dismissed most of these stories as apocryphal. Regardless of the specifics, Peabody's outgoing manner won admirers among the locals, including Wyatt Earp, whose family donated the altar rail for the new church.

Peabody was frequently homesick and left Tombstone on July 17, 1882, one month after St. Paul's opened and six months after he arrived in Tombstone. George Whitwell Parson noted in his diary that day, "We will not easily fill Peabody's place."

In 2007, to commemorate the church's 125th anniversary, Peabody was added to the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona. His feast day is November 17.