ST. JAMES CHURCH

On Wednesday, August 20, 1890, the Rt. Reverend Henry Adams Neely, second resident Bishop of Maine, and four accompanying clerics, all appropriately robed, strode out of the studio home of Winslow Homer at Prouts Neck, and, crossing over the dirt road, mounted the front steps of a church almost directly opposite the studio.

There, they were received by the Chapel's officers, among them J. Vaughan Merrick, Rector's Warden of St. Timothy's Church in Roxborough, Philadelphia (the mission's "mother" congregation), and Charles Savage Homer, Sr., the patriarch of the family who were then Prouts Necks' principal landowners.

The first of these gentlemen read the Bishop a Request to Consecrate, and the second-named certified that the building was free of all indebtedness. Then, with appropriate solemnities, Bishop Neely Created St. James Church, Prouts Neck, and dedicated it to the patron saint of fishermen and "all them that go down to the sea in ships." After the service, Bishop Neely, his fellow clergy, and new congregation's officers and invited guests repaired to the cottage next door to the studio then and now called The Ark, where all partook of the Homers' celebrated hospitality.

Thus was born a congregation which has become a unique, unifying force in the history of Prouts Neck.