St. Peter's Episcopal Church

The bishop who dedicated St. Peter's in 1871 led a second life beyond Texas. In 1867 Alexander Gregg sailed for England to join the bishops gathered at Lambeth Palace, carrying letters to help publish his History of the Old Cheraws, which appeared in London that year. He came home to find that yellow fever had killed two of his priests. From 1868 he spent nearly every summer at Sewanee, and in 1887 the University of the South's trustees elected him chancellor unanimously. His Civil War books went to the Carnegie Library at Palestine, and he is buried at Cheraw.

What the plaque says

St. Peter's Episcopal Church The Rt. Rev. Alexander Gregg, Bishop of the Diocese of Texas, officiated at the dedication of St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Rockport on November 30, 1871. Led by lay ministers for much of its early history, St. Peter's first was located at the corner of Live Oak and Wharf Streets near the railroad depot, where services often were halted due to the noise of arriving and departing trains. Relocated to this site in 1954, St. Peter's became a self-sustaining parish ten years later. It continues to serve the community with a variety of programs. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fulton Mansion State Historic Site — 2.4 mi
  A French Second Empire house of 1874-77 on Aransas Bay, paid for with hides and tallow, with gas lights, central heat and hot running water no other house nearby had.
• Goose Island State Park — 8.5 mi
  A bayside park between St. Charles and Aransas bays, home of the Big Tree, the state champion coastal live oak, thought to be more than a thousand years old.
• Port Aransas — 13 mi
  The fishing town at the north end of Mustang Island, reached by a free state ferry that crosses the ship channel day and night, with a university marine lab begun in a one-room shack.
• Aransas National Wildlife Refuge — 25 mi
  Blackjack Peninsula's refuge on San Antonio Bay, winter home of the only wild migrating flock of whooping cranes, which fell to about fifty birds and now numbers over five hundred.

More markers nearby

• Aransas County — steps away
• First Presbyterian Church of Rockport — steps away
• Jackson Family Maritime Companies — steps away
• Sacred Heart Catholic Church — steps away