History Students and Faculty Digitize Campus-Adjacent Cathedral’s Archives

By Joseph D’Andrea

The beautiful church on Cathedral Avenue, adjacent to Cherry Valley Avenue, which you pass as you enter campus is more than a place of worship — it’s somewhere for research, too.

Starting its construction in the late 1870s, the Cathedral of the Incarnation is one of the earliest examples of large-scale, neo-gothic architecture in America, and it serves as the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island. For comparison, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan was completed right around the time when the cornerstone was laid on the Cathedral of the Incarnation. 

The cathedral was built by the family of Alexander T. Stewart, a 19th century import and retail mogul who was one of the wealthiest men in America at the time. Stewart had bought up most of the land that is now Garden City and Stewart Manor (including the land on which Adelphi sits) as part of an effort to build a planned community for his employees. He died before the project could be fully realized, but his urban planning vision is still evident in the surrounding community with things like the excessively wide streets. Once the Cathedral was finished, Cornelia gave it to the Episcopal Church, which took it over as the diocesan seat for the Bishopric of Long Island.

Edward A. Reno, chair and associate professor of Medieval history in Adelphi’s History Department, recently recruited two students, senior Thea Crouch and junior Alex Neampong, to finalize work on the large database of the cathedral’s documents, some of which date back to the 18th century. They are also developing research projects related to materials they find particularly interesting.

(L-R) Senior history major Thea Crouch, Professor Edward Reno and junior history major Alex Neampong have led the effort to digitize the Cathedral of the Incarnation’s centuries-old documents. (Credit: The Adelphi University Department of History)

“In terms of having a formal connection between an academic department and the cathedral, this is a first,” said Crouch, a history and art double-major. “However, I did happen to stumble upon documents in the archive that indicated that the cathedral held special Christmas services, specifically for Adelphi students back in the early 20th century.”

In the spring of 2024, when Adelphi was searching for partners, Crouch helped facilitate a meeting with the cathedral’s staff as a member of its choir. Then, in the summer, she decided to apply for a summer research fellowship through Adelphi’s SPARK Center for Undergraduates and the Honors College, which connects students with a variety of opportunities with faculty mentors, while also providing funding.

“Her receipt of that grant and diligent work over the summer is the main reason why the project had a successful launch and continued possibilities into the future,” Reno said.

After Cornelia died, the archive had been put into folders and been given a basic card catalog description, but not thoroughly. Due to this, Reno said, “the goal of the summer project with Thea was to produce a digital database of all the contents of the archive, which involved going through hundreds of individual documents and recording a description of their contents.”

The first stage of the project was more or less completed by the end of this past summer, “but there were still some gaps and inconsistencies as often happens with any large-scale project that unfolds over the course of several months.”

The diocese also maintains a larger archive on the property in a different building, which houses material related to the diocese as a whole, and is run by a full-time archivist.

“Starting next year we also plan to have students work in the larger archive, where they will actually get to work alongside a professional archivist and see how the fundamental work of preservation is done,” Reno said.

Reno hopes that students see the foundational work that makes everything historians do possible.

“No archives, no history. In addition, I want them to understand the process by which an historical document or text goes from being hidden away in a folder, to maybe one day showing up in one of their sourcebooks they use in class, both as students in the present and teachers some day in the future,” Reno said. “Someone had to stumble across it, examine it, understand its importance, and then edit the text – including providing explanatory and contextual information – in order to make it usable for the general public. This is the indispensable work that makes it possible for us to do ours.”