When Dr. D. Preston Wysong moved from Manhasset to Port Washington in 1891 to become the community’s first physician, the family missed the Sunday School at Christ Church for their boys. So that fall, his wife, Rebecca, started Sunday School classes in their Carlton Avenue home. Several children from the neighborhood joined the Wysong children for Bible stories and hymn singing.
Within a year, several mothers of the Sunday School organized as a Women’s Guild, and Rebecca Wysong’s brother, the Rev. Charles L. Newbold, came over from Manhasset to baptize some of the children and to conduct services.
In 1896, the Women’s Guild bought a lot on the corner of Jackson and Covert Streets and built a small wooden chapel; the first service at “Christ Church Mission Chapel” was held on August 9, 1896. The following year, Frances DuPuy of Philadelphia gave the chapel a reed organ that had belonged to her late brother, B. Stephen DuPuy; as a result, the congregation voted to rename itself “St. Stephen’s Chapel.” Miss DuPuy later gave other gifts to the chapel, including an alms basin that is still in use.
In 1905, St. Stephen’s was incorporated as a parish and called the Rev. William Nies as our first Rector. In the same year, the parish bought the current plot of land on Carlton Avenue and moved the building to that land. The first service on the new site was held on Christmas Eve, 1905.
In 1908, the present stone building was started. It was about half as long as it now is, with a large window at each end of the building, and the entrance on the south side near the rear. It was dedicated in 1910 and consecrated in 1916. The window at the east end was replaced by the St. Stephen window in 1922, and the current altar was installed in 1934; both were donated by the same person.
In 1926, the old chapel building was demolished; it was replaced by the current Parish Hall, which was dedicated in 1927. In 1955, the church was expanded to its present size, with a chapel underneath. The Parish Hall was also expanded in 1962.
St. Stephen’s has a long tradition of working with other religious organizations to meet the spiritual and physical needs of our community. As early as 1930, we held joint Easter sunrise services with the Lutherans, Methodists and Baptists. Since the 1940s, we have participated in the ecumenical Thanksgiving Eve services. We have joined with other local clergy in the annual Blessing of the Fleet (which was started by our own Dr. Woon). We have partnered with the two Roman Catholic parishes and the Lutheran congregation to help people who suffered material losses from fires and storms. We have offered our facilities to other religious groups when they needed space during rebuilding programs.
We have also worked outside our own community with programs as diverse as resettlement of Vietnamese refugees, development of microloans for Ugandan women, and working to ensure fair treatment of international seafarers.
A History Note
Phillip Brooks was a prominent Episcopal rector in the late 1800s. and later became the Bishop of Massachusetts. He was best known then as a preacher, but today is perhaps best remembered as the author of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
Bishop Brooks had a small connection with St. Stephen’s. The Rev. Walter Bentley was our first English-born Rector serving from 1920 to 1925. He had been a Shakespearean actor on tour in the US when he heard Phillips Brooks preach, and that inspired him to become a priest. While at St. Stephen’s, Bentley produced and starred in two Shakespeare plays at the high school (now the Landmark on Main Street) auditorium to raise money for our new Parish Hall.
The Case of the Missing Window
On February 18, 1945, St. Stephen’s dedicated a stained glass window in memory of Susie Kelly Moseman Balch, the mother of our organist, Wilbur Balch. The window, created by Jessie van Brunt, was entitled “The Window of the Mountains” and bore the inscription “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help” from Psalm 121. It is not known where the window was installed in the church; when the first set of the current stained glass windows was installed in 1946, the Balch window was replaced by the “St. James the Less” window, given in memory of Susie Balch and her husband Wallace.
There is no record of what happened to the original Balch window.
Gifts of a Woman
Ida Bell Merritt was born in 1861, a daughter of Captain Israel J. Merritt of Whitestone, th
e owner of a ship salvage firm, and Sarah Nicholson. A widow at age 40, she married in 1906 Welford P. Hulse, an insurance executive and apparently a family friend. The Hulses came to Port Washington before 1920, living first at 41 Murray Avenue and later at 9 Huntington Road. Ida died in August 1935, and Welford the following year; both funerals were conducted by Dr. Woon.
On the death of her father in 1911, Ida inherited a fifth of his estate, said to be worth half a million dollars. In 1922, she donated the St. Stephen window that stands at the front of the church, and twelve years later, she donated the “new” altar that stands in front of the window.
Coming to America
“A lot of people don’t know what freedom is unless they’ve lost it.” – Hoa Du, April 1981.
In 1979, while traveling in Asia, Fr. Kurt von Roeschlaub (then our Curate, now our Rector Emeritus) and his wife, Priscilla, met with the Anglican Bishop of Hong Kong and Macau, the Rt. Rev. J. Gilbert H. Baker. Bishop Baker told them about the plight of ethnic Chinese stranded on ships in the harbor. They had either fled or been expelled from Vietnam in the persecutions following the collapse of the South Vietnamese government. On his return, Fr. Kurt preached a sermon about the horrors of life for millions of refugees who had fled the various conflicts in Southeast Asia and were living in refugee camps, and the challenge of extending a loving hand to even a few of these unfortunates.
By the end of October, forty parishioners, led by Gay and Ted Murray, Martha and Paul Seidel, and Loring Batten, had formed a refugee resettlement committee. The committee started to explore how best to respond.
Within months, the committee had filed an application with the Presiding Bishop’s Fund for World Relief (now Episcopal Relief & Development) to sponsor a family, and by February of 1980, members of the Du family were on their way to Port Washington.
The Dus were an ethnic Chinese family living in Saigon, then the capital of the Republic of (South) Vietnam. After the North Vietnamese had conquered South Vietnam in 1975, the communist government expropriated the family’s steel business. The family were only allocated a small amount of money each month, barely enough to survive on. Later, the government invaded their home and took an inventory of all their possessions; anything beyond a certain limit was seized.
Many times the Dus planned to flee their country, and in fact one of the sons actually made an attempt, but was caught and jailed for a short time. Finally in 1978 the regime opened the door for people to leave, provided they forfeited even the meager possessions they had left.
So the seven Dus – Du Hieu, the patriarch, and his wife, their daughter Du Thu Van, their two sons, Du Nghe Duc and Du Kien Hoa, Hoa’s wife, Tong Tue Linh, and Hoa and Linh’s two-year-old daughter Du Van Phuong, called “Hon-hon” – boarded a small boat along with 700 others. (In many Southeast Asian countries, the family name comes first.) Almost as soon as they set out, the overloaded boat capsized and sank; Du Hieu’s wife and as many as 350 more people drowned.
A few weeks later, the remaining Dus set out aboard a Hong Kong-based freighter, the MV Tung An. After being turned away from ports in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei, the “boat people” finally arrived at Tara Island, in the Province of Palawan, Philippines, on December 26, 1978.
Another Du son, later called Frank, was attending the University of Montreal during his family’s turmoil in Saigon and the refugee camp but came to New York when he heard there was some possibility of refugees coming here from the Philippines. He contacted a New York refugee committee and somehow found out that St. Stephen’s had signed up to sponsor a family. He then followed up by contacting Fr. Kurt, which led to our sponsoring the Du family.
One letter was sent to raise funds for the work. It netted over $20,000, enough to begin the project. Donations of all items needed including housing, dental work, clothing, and transportation were received, and additional funds came in, enough to help support the family until they became self-sufficient. Local realtor Charles E. Hyde “Bucky” Walker provided a home for them a few blocks from the church. Other churches and agencies emulated the way this process was organized, and Saint Stephen’s became a center for monthly gatherings of the Vietnamese and Cambodian exile communities.
Due to a bureaucratic mixup, only Hoa, Linh, and Hon-hon were able to come first; Hieu, Van and Duc had to remain in the Philippines for another year.
In time, the Dus became U.S. citizens and continue to participate fully in life in their adopted country. Hoa and Linh had another child after they settled here, a boy they named Christopher in tribute to the Christian love from our parish family. Hoa (now called Kevin) is the Comptroller of the Nassau County Medical Center, Linh (Lynn) is a professional real estate broker in Syosset, and “Hon-hon” (Cathy) is the manager of significant real estate interests in Manhattan. We still see them here at St. Stephen’s on occasion.
For more of our history, come to the church or visit our History Facebook page here
