Crapsey Family Papers

Algernon Sidney Crapsey was born in Fairmount, Ohio in 1847 and ordained a n Episcopal priest in 1873. He was assistant minister at St. Paul's Chapel of Trinity Church in New York City before becoming rector at St. Andrew's Church on Averill Avenue in Rochester in 1879. His work at St. Andrew's strengthened a struggling church. An advocate of the Social Gospel movement, Crapsey was a reformer in social and economic matters. However, some of his theological views were highly controversial. After publishing a collection of essays, Religion and Politics, in 1905 that insinuated Jesus was neither born of a virgin or divine, Reverend Crapsey was tried for heresy and defrocked in 1906. Despite this dramatic change in his life circumstances, Crapsey continued to have a large following in Rochester. A home for him and his family was funded by Rochester businessman William Rossiter Seward, he led a religious group known as The Brotherhood, and he was active in charitable causes. He also found regular employment as a state parole officer. He also published an autobiography, The Last of the Heretics, amongst other writings. Reverend Crapsey passed away on December 31, 1927.

Adelaide Trowbridge Crapsey was born March 7, 1855 in Catskill, New York, daughter of Marcus and Harriet Trowbridge. Her father was publisher of the Catskill Examiner. She married Algernon Sidney Crapsey in 1875, moving with him to Rochester four years later. The couple had nine children: Philip Crapsey (1876–1907), Emily Margaret Crapsey (1877–1901), Adelaide Crapsey (1878–1914), Paul Bontecou Crapsey (1880–1961), Rachel Morris Crapsey (1882–1942), Algernon Sidney Crapsey (1884–1955), Ruth Elizabeth Crapsey (1887–1898), Marie Louise Crapsey (1891–1979) and Arthur Hunt Crapsey (1896–1955). She lived a quiet life as a clergyman's wife until his heresy trial in 1906; notably, she founded Rochester's first kindergarten at St. Andrew's Church. She also built a sewing circle with the church women that was noted for making fine layettes for infants. With her husband's sudden unemployment, Adelaide continued supporting her husband's endeavors while developing her sewing work into a business. The Adelaide T. Crapsey Company dveloped a reputation for its excellent infant clothing, especially frocks and dresses, along with its progressive employment practices and emphasis on worker welfare. Unfortunately, the company was forced to close in 1935 during the Great Depression. Adelaide Trowbridge Crapsey lived on, a noted figure in the community, until her passing on January 8, 1950.

Adelaide Crapsey was born to Algernon Sidney and Adelaide Trowbridge Crapsey in 1878 in Brooklyn Heights, New York, moving to Rochester the next year with her family. She was sent to attend school at Kemper Hall in Wisconsin in 1893. Graduating at the head of her class, she went on to Vassar, where she wrote, played basketball and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1901. She returned to teach literature and history at Kemper Hall in 1903, but went to Europe in 1904 to lecture and study archaeology. She returned to teaching the following year, now at Miss Low's school in Stamford, Connecticut, but found herself progressively unable to do so due to exhaustion, and had to quit in 1908. She wrote poetry at this time, developing the cinquain verse for which she is best remembered. Unfortunately, she was also progressing ever deeper into tuberculosis, and by the time she took up the post of professor of poetics at Smith College in 1911, she had tubercuin meningitis. In 1912 she was forced to leave this position and take up residency at a rest home on Saranac Lake, where she continued to write poetry. Coming home to visit family in Rochester in summer of 1914, she suffered a relapse in October and passedd away in her family home on Averill Avenue on October 8, 1914. The author of roughly 100 mature poems, her sole publication , Verse, was released posthumously by Claude Bragdon's Manas Press in 1915. The publication was well received.