Endicott Peabody: The Boston Parson Who Came to Tombstone

By George Self

A New Kind of Parson

Nothing about Endicott Peabody fit the mold of a frontier preacher. He was a Boston-bred Harvard man, born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1857, who had spent seven years growing up in England while his father worked for the J.S. Morgan Company. He stood over six feet tall and was, by every account, powerfully built. He had come to Tombstone straight from seminary, with almost no preaching experience, after a friend of his brother passed along word that the town's Episcopal congregation needed someone for a six-month assignment. Some Bostonians warned him that Tombstone was "the rottenest place you ever saw." He accepted anyway.

He stepped off a stagecoach on a cold January day in 1882. En route, a fellow passenger had described men killed in the streets and stage robberies five times a week. The driver, wary of another holdup, put two armed passengers on shotgun. Peabody noted in his journal as they passed a dry wash: "Passed [the] hollow where drivers [had] been stood up three weeks before... happily no robbers."

Tombstone noticed him immediately. The Tombstone Epitaph welcomed "a parson who doesn't flirt with the girls, who doesn't drink beer behind the door, and when it comes to baseball, he's a daisy." The Daily Nugget reported a miner's reaction upon having the new minister pointed out to him: "Well, if that lad's argument was a hammer, and religion a drill, he'd knock a hole in the hanging wall of skepticism."

Muscular Christianity on the Frontier

Peabody had absorbed a philosophy called muscular Christianity during his years in England, drawn primarily from the writings of Church of England rector Charles Kingsley. Kingsley's ideal Christian was a man who "fears God and can walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours, breathe God's free air on God's rich earth, and at the same time can hit a woodcock, doctor a horse, and twist a poker around his fingers." It was a vision of faith expressed through physical vigor, community service, and active engagement with the world rather than retreat from it.

Peabody brought that vision directly into his first sermon, delivered on February 5, 1882, before roughly seventy parishioners. He was delighted to note in his journal that it was "a majority men, thank goodness!" He confronted head-on the obvious tension between his athletic frame and the popular image of a preacher: "One sometimes hears it asserted that religion is effeminate, that it is suited only to women and children... if true manliness has in it cleaving to that which is right and abhorring which is wrong, in helping others in trouble or sorrow, in mixing with the world and sympathizing with the world and yet trying to make the world better, then I say that religion is truly manly."

Baseball as Evangelism

The evening after his first sermon, Peabody sat on the parsonage porch, lit a cigar, and started scheming with two new friends about fielding a baseball team. For the next several months, baseball was his primary means of ministry. He rode out to mines outside town on a regular basis, organized pickup games, and frequently captained a side. One incredulous miner, upon seeing this minister playing ball, reportedly said: "Why is that the minister there? Well, I'll be damned if I don't think more of him than I did before."

Peabody took the games seriously. He recorded them in his journal with competitive precision, pleased when his side won and self-critical when it did not: "Capital game of base ball. I was capt[ain] of 1 side which was victorious, but I made 2 disgusting miffs." He was not above cutting short a house call if a game broke out nearby. On April 26, 1882, he helped organize Tombstone's first formal baseball team, serving as treasurer and later as vice president. When the playing field needed leveling, he mounted a horse and spent two hours doing the work himself, even while feeling unwell.

A Parson Playing Cowboy

As spring arrived, Peabody bought a black horse named Robin for seventy dollars, outfitted himself in a large-brimmed felt hat, flannel shirt, riding britches, leather gaiters, and shooting boots, and rode armed excursions into the surrounding countryside. "Looked quite the cowboy and was greeted as such," he wrote with evident satisfaction. One week in mid-May he set out "with pistol at belt, green goggles on eyes, pipe in mouth" to visit mines on the road to Tucson.

His Fourth of July that year was characteristic: not interested in the raucous town celebrations, he and three friends drove a rented wagon into the desert, shot their guns, napped under a tree, and had their cook prepare the quail and rabbits they killed for dinner. He ended the day watching "the fireworks on the hill but they did not amount to much."

Ministering to the Sick and the Dying

Beyond baseball and horseback riding, Peabody made regular visits to the hospital throughout the week, bringing reading materials to patients and sitting with them in conversation. On one occasion he sat with Billy Grounds, an injured member of the Cowboy faction. "Told him of the hope of forgiveness but he feared it was too late," Peabody wrote in his journal. "Told him the story of the prodigal son and asked him of his father and mother and he eventually broke down." Grounds promised to consider what they had discussed and to pray for repentance.

His closest friend in Tombstone was George Whitwell Parsons, a Washington D.C.-born prospector who had come to town with Milton Clapp. Parsons had been attending the Methodist congregation but eventually switched his allegiance to Peabody's Episcopal church. The two were united by religion, a love of physical activity, and a shared desire to see the town become more orderly. Parsons posted water-source signs in the desert surrounding Tombstone after several prospectors died of thirst.

The warmth between them comes through vividly in Parsons' journal. After walking home together from an evening church service in early March 1882, the two men sat up at the parsonage smoking and talking. Parsons described Peabody as "a sensible, manly fellow," "quite an athlete and of magnificent build, weighing nearly 200 lbs., muscles hard as iron." Eyeing that build, Parsons hatched a plan. McIntyre, the Methodist minister, "thinks he is something with the gloves," Parsons wrote, "so I must try to get up a sparring match between him and Peabody and go all on Episcopal. Methodist will get licked as sure as fate. Both have told me they would box with the other, so some time after Lent is over I must arrange a battle. What joy." Both ministers apparently agreed to the idea. Lent ended in early April 1882, but the match never came together. McIntyre's health collapsed around the same time, Peabody was gone by July, and Tombstone was deprived of what would have been one of the more memorable sporting events in its history.

Tombstone's Troubles

Peabody arrived in the immediate aftermath of the O.K. Corral gunfight and spent his six months in Tombstone watching the Earp-Clanton feud reach its violent conclusion. On March 18, 1882, Morgan Earp was shot through a billiard-room window while playing pool. Peabody heard that Morgan's last words were, "Well Jim, that's the last game I will ever play." He found that troubling: it seemed to reveal a lack of "religious feeling or unsaid human feeling for his wife and family."

Peabody and Parsons saw the subsequent Earp vendetta differently. Parsons, an enthusiastic Earp partisan, wrote: "More killing by Earp party. Hope they'll keep it up." Peabody was quieter and more troubled by the violence. His private journal expressed a clear preference: "Best they will leave Arizona and then we shall have peace." His wish came true when Wyatt Earp left the territory in mid-April. Later in life, Peabody publicly declared his support for the Earps, but his journals from the time tell a more complicated story.

He also joined other clergy in an attempt at civic reform. On April 25, 1882, he met at the parsonage of Catholic priest Father Bloise with fellow ministers and newspaper editor John P. Clum to draft a petition asking Tombstone merchants to close on Sundays. Parsons signed the petition, noting in his own journal, "I don't do business on Sundays." The effort never gained enough momentum to sway the town council.

Building St. Paul's

The most lasting achievement of Peabody's six months in Tombstone was the building he left behind. Early in his tenure, the Episcopal congregation held services in whatever makeshift space was available, including the Fremont Street courtroom. Peabody and Parsons worked to change that. On June 18, 1882, St. Paul's Episcopal Church opened its doors for the first time. Peabody's journal entry that day was brief and satisfied: "Church looking bright and pleasant. Large congregation, nearly all the seats filled."

St. Paul's is now the oldest Episcopal church in Arizona, and it still stands in Tombstone today. Before leaving, Peabody took care to identify his successor: Isaac Bagnell, chosen in part for his ability to hold his own on a baseball diamond, ensuring the ministry of muscular Christianity would continue.

Departure and a Remarkable Legacy

After six months, Peabody delivered his farewell sermon from the pulpit of the church he had built, taking his text from 2 Corinthians 13:11: "Finally, brethren, farewell. Be perfect, be of good comfort, be of one mind, live in peace." Then he stepped into a carriage and headed east.

He returned to seminary, was ordained, and married Fannie Peabody (his first cousin). The Tombstone experience had clarified something important: he had concluded he was "a lousy preacher" who could not sustain weekly sermons. But the town had shown him what he could do: reform through sport, male community, and embodied faith.

In 1884, Peabody founded Groton School in Massachusetts, a small boarding school thirty-five miles outside Boston built on the muscular Christianity principles he had tested in Tombstone. The school's mission statement made the philosophy explicit: "Every endeavor will be made to cultivate manly, Christian character, having regard to moral and physical as well as intellectual development."

Among Groton's early students was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Peabody officiated at Franklin and Eleanor's wedding. After FDR was diagnosed with polio, one of Eleanor's first letters from the sanitarium went to Peabody. Even after voting for Herbert Hoover, Peabody conducted a church service before Roosevelt's first inauguration and remained a regular advisor and visitor during the presidency. At Peabody's funeral in 1944, Roosevelt delivered the eulogy: "As long as I live his influence will mean more to me than that of any other people next to my father and mother."

The man who stepped off a stagecoach into Tombstone's cold January streets in 1882, worried about stagecoach robbers and trying his hardest not to look like a greenhorn, had spent six months building a church, organizing baseball games, riding armed into the desert, and sitting with the dying. He left convinced he had not been particularly good at preaching. He was probably right. But in Tombstone he found the philosophy that shaped the rest of his life, and through the students he educated at Groton, it went on to shape the century.