Scott, Thomas Fielding
From Lane Co Oregon
The Right Reverend Thomas Fielding Scott
First Episcopal Missionary Bishop of the Oregon Territory
It is no exaggeration to say that in April 1854, when Missionary Bishop to the Oregon Territory, Thomas Fielding Scott, and his wife arrived in Portland, there were huge challenges in store for them. The Scotts had just completed the always dangerous transit from the East Coast by ship, by land through Panama’s jungles, and by ship again to California and finally Portland. Scott would make that journey twice more during his service to attend General Conventions, mainly to plead for more priests to be sent to help in his mission of establishing Episcopal congregations in Oregon.
The Oregon Territory to which the Bishop was assigned was vast, largely unmapped, with roads still little more than Indian trails. Bishop Scott described his life as being “continually on the tramp”. None of the usual ways of travel - by wagon, canoe, riverboat, horseback, or by foot - was easy for a man who stood over six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds. The Civil War and what the Bishop called “those insane gold hunts” caused much social disruption to the Bishop’s hopes of creating social and spiritual stability among his flock.
Scott’s biographer, Thomas E. Jessett, estimates that there were less than fifty congregants in the entire territory when Bishop Scott arrived in 1854. In the Portland area there were three small churches and two clergymen. The Rev. John D. McCarty, a U.S. Army chaplain, was in charge of Trinity, Portland. The Rev. St. Michael Fackler, in the Oregon Territory since 1847, was a widower living on a claim near Butteville with an infant daughter to care for. Recruiting and retaining clergy would be Bishop Scott’s biggest challenge in his years in Oregon. The priests who came to Oregon were very loyal to their bishop. On his departure in 1867, Scott left eight priests in Oregon and two in Washington. There were three self-supporting churches and thirteen structures completed.
A North Carolina native and a former Presbyterian minister, Bishop Scott was 46 years old when he became Oregon’s first Missionary Bishop. His contemporaries described him as a “strong scholar and a good preacher.” The Bishop wasted no time in going about the business of building a diocese. By June 1854 he had called a convention in Portland, to which ten people came. His ability to build a diocese was also challenged because of the Church Mission Board’s requirement that the local units build churches entirely on their own.
In October 1854, Bishop Scott was in Eugene City where he took possession of an acre of land given to him for a church building by the town’s founder, Eugene Skinner. Skinner’s wife, Mary, was among the first worshippers at the service we are commemorating today. Bishop Scott would make several more visits to Eugene City over the next few years, and in 1859 he came back to dedicate the new church building completed on the land given by the Skinners.
In 1867, exhausted from years of constant travel, and having requested an East Coast assignment, Bishop and Mrs. Scott left Oregon, taking the same sea/land route that had brought them here thirteen years before. As their ship approached New York City, the Bishop became ill, possibly with a fever contracted on their journey across the Isthmus of Panama. Bishop Scott was taken from the ship to a hospital. He died a few days later and was buried in the Trinity Church graveyard on Wall Street. He had faithfully carried out his mission of laying foundations for new churches and teaching his congregants to be “ambassadors for Christ” in Oregon.
