Saint Mark's Episcopal Church: 150 Years of Ministry
in Downtown San Antonio, 1858–2008

$30.00
(hardcover)

Lewis F. Fisher

152 pages, 10 x 10 inches, hardcover, 151 illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index
ISBN: 978-1-893271-48-7

How a new congregation of 40 Episcopalians struggling against general rowdiness in an isolated frontier outpost of 8,000 inhabitants had the daring to commission Richard Upjohn, the nation’s leading church architect, to design their church—and then to build it—is the start of one of the stories that makes San Antonio such an unusual place.

As various denominations worked to establish churches in San Antonio, missionaries were able to form an Episopal church in town in 1850, but it was another eight years before their efforts bore lasting fruit with St. Mark’s. Robert E. Lee and other Episcopalians in the U.S. Army helped keep things going. St. Mark’s became one of the major churches in San Antonio and in the Episcopal Church as well. Among its landmark events was the wedding of future President Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Taylor in 1934. St. Mark’s produced a profusion of bishops as it endured and thrived even as downtown churches elswhere were having difficult times.

This book, laced with color illustrations and new architectural photography, succinctly recounts 150 years of struggles and triumphs in a significant congregation’s remarkable journey.


"Fisher has written a warm and sometimes wryly witty account of the growth of this vital spiritual center in the heart of downtown. He artfully unfolds the story of not only the communicants and their leaders, but their changing relationships to the larger city of which they have always been very much a part. The book's photographic record alone is striking." —San Antonio Express-News

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