History

The parish of Christ Church was established in Greenwich on December 25, 1833, but the tradition of Anglican worship in this part of Connecticut dates from the early years of the eighteenth century.  In 1705 the Rev. George Muirson, rector of Christ’s Church, Rye (New York), paid a visit to Greenwich, where he conducted a worship service and preached in a private home.  Muirson, a Scot ordained in the Church of England, had been sent as a missionary to the Colony of New York by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.  In those pre-Revolutionary times, there was no separate “Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America,” but the Anglican worship of the eighteenth century, anchored in the liturgies of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, would have been readily recognizable by the Episcopalians of today with our 1979 American prayer books.

As Muirson set about his mission to introduce the traditions of the Church of England to “the benighted government of Connecticut,” he was accompanied on his excursions to Greenwich and Stamford by Colonel Caleb Heathcote, an Anglican layman (and lord of the manor of Scarsdale).  Heathcote’s presence – mounted on horseback and bristling with sidearms – maintained a standard of decorum during worship, effectively discouraging any local rowdies who might otherwise have been inclined to disruptive behavior at divine service.