Endicott Peabody

Endicott Peabody was a blue-blood easterner with a semester of divinity school under his belt when he went to Tombstone in January 1882.

He made friends (including Wyatt Earp), built a congregation and raised $5000 to construct an Episcopal church—St. Paul’s—which opened that June.  It has held services every Sunday since then in what is the oldest Protestant church in Arizona.

Peabody went back east and became a famed educator; one of his students was future president Franklin Roosevelt. Some Arizona Episcopal churches hold a feast day in his honor on November 17, the date of his death.