Jacob S. Hughes

NOTE: In 2011 Laura M. DiPaolo wrote an exhaustive history of the Methodist Ministers’ burial ground, Section 131 at Mount Moriah. “God’s Forgotten Acre” was published in the Journal of the Historical Society of the EPA Conference (Eastern Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church). As part of that document, this is the life story she wrote of one of the church’s notable ministers in Philadelphia.

Jacob S. Hughes was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania on Christmas Day, 1840. He came to Christ as a teenager, and in 1864 at the age of 24, was admitted to the Philadelphia Conference as a traveling preacher. Ordained a deacon in 1866 and an elder in 1868, his ministry would encompass 62 years under active appointment, a record unmatched at that time, serving in 12 different charges.

Hughes twice represented Philadelphia as a delegate to the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and served on a wide variety of boards and committees locally, including a 30-year stint as treasurer and corresponding secretary for the Preachers’ Aid Society. From 1897 to 1901 he was Presiding Elder (today’s District Superintendent) of the West Philadelphia District.

In 1901 he was appointed the pastor of historic St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, the mother church of regional Methodism, dating to 1769. His appointment coincided with the suspension of pastoral tenure limits by the larger church; Hughes would remain at St. George’s 25 years, the longest pastoral tenure in the church’s history, and he left a significant legacy.

Years of neighborhood changes from a residential to business area had resulted in a significant membership decline. Shortly after Hughes began his pastorate, a conference-wide fund drive was begun to raise St. George’s endowment, to insure that the Methodist landmark would survive.

Assisted by the leadership of Rev. Samuel W. Thomas, former Pennsylvania Governor Robert E. Pattison (whose father had served as pastor of St. George’s, 1863-1865) and the Hon. John Field, the campaign was launched at the1902 Philadelphia Conference session. Some $11,500, a significant sum for that day, was raised and managed by the Conference Endowment Commission to help maintain St. George’s.

Most significantly, however, was Hughes’ leadership in saving the historic church from the wrecking ball. In the early 1920s, the City of Philadelphia planned to seize St. George’s by eminent domain and raze it in order to make room for the proposed erection of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. With the active leadership of retired Bishop Thomas Neely, Hughes and a team of colleagues worked to secure St. George’s, and succeeded in having the path of the bridge moved to the south where it stands today, 14 feet from the walls of the old church.

As part of the process, the church sold two properties to the bridge commission, at 227 N. 4th Street and 226 N. Lawrence Street. The bridge construction also required lowering 4th Street, radically changing the appearance of the church, as the main doors moved from street level to one story high, and were now reached by a set of exterior steps.

Hughes was married twice; his first wife Lizzie Rambo, died in 1868. In 1874 he married Mary Armour, the ceremony performed by Jacob’s brother, Rev. Levi B. Hughes. The couple shared in ministry for nearly 50 years, with Mary’s special focus on Sunday School work. “She was a Bible class teacher of superior ability,” her conference memorial later recorded; “few persons of her generation were more familiar with the Scriptures than she was.”

Jacob Hughes died on March 5, 1926, and his funeral was held in St. George’s, in the same space where he had been ordained during the conference session held there in 1866. He was laid to rest at Mount Moriah with his two wives and a son who had died in infancy in 1875. A daughter, Bessie, survived him. Jacob Hughes was remembered as “illuminated to the very core of his being; the light of God was in him and shone out of him.”