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Rev. Frederick Fairweather Flewelling
Born 1872 Died 1914
St. John’s Episcopal Cemetery, Barrytown. Pinkish granite tablet on a pedestal on the north-east side of the cemetery, up the hill a bit not far from the tree line.
As his tombstone tells us, Rev. Flewelling was the rector of St. John the Evangelist from 1912-1914. He died at 42 of pneumonia while recovering from an emergency appendectomy at St. Luke’s in New York City on April 13th of 1914, cutting short what would probably have been a long and memorable service to the Barrytown community. His life before he came to Barrytown was busy and remarkable.
Frederick was born on March 6th, 1872 in New Brunswick, Canada and came to the US in 1888. In addition to his time at St. John’s, he served in many locations including Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and The Klondike in Canada’s Yukon Territory.
He arrived at The Klondike during its gold rush on October 17th, 1896 and lived at a fishing village near the mouth of the river. His aim was to minister to the miners residing in hundreds of tents encroaching on the land of the native Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in people. Though most of the land was claimed by men seeking gold, he found and purchased 40 acres at a place called Moosehide and set space aside for structures to support his mission (on which St. Barnabas Anglican Church was erected in 1908) but reserved most of it for the native people.
Frederick had been ministering at St. Mark’s Protestant Episcopal church in Johnstown, PA when he was enumerated in the census in 1910. A short while after this, local philanthropist Andrew Zabriskie was instrumental in bringing Frederick to Barrytown. Zabriskie had just built a rectory in memory of his mother and Frederick and his family were its first inhabitants.
In June of 1913 Frederick gave a talk at Christ Church in Red Hook on his time in The Klondike, complete with stereoscopic pictures.
He married Mabel C. Smith and they had six boys between 1902 and 1913, Reginald H., F. Donald, Kenneth H., Gerald A., F. Lawrence, Ernest U., and Alan C. The Red Hook Journal of April 17th, 1914 stated that “in this short time [Rev. Flewelling] won the love and respect of the entire community. He was a man of exceptional charm of manner, a devoted christian, an able minister of the gospel. His death is a great loss to his church and the community, and is deeply deplored by all who knew him.”