First Episcopal cathedral in the South (1871)

Thirteen years after its founding, St. Mary's became the first Episcopal cathedral in the American South.^[2] While the 1866 Journal of the Proceedings of the Diocese of Tennessee's 34th convention and the national Episcopal Church's 1868 Journal of the General Convention both list St. Mary's as a cathedral church, the official transition from parish to "bishop's church" was January 1, 1871.

At the time, only a handful of Episcopal dioceses had adopted the English-style cathedral system, mostly in the Midwest and the western frontier, where semi-itinerant bishops required more tangible ecclesiastical bases from which to administer sparse, but expansive, new dioceses and missionary territories. While the Episcopal Church was once a part of the Church of England, the American dioceses were slow to designate official cathedrals in keeping with the Protestant or Reformed character of its members. But as the Oxford Movement's "high church" or Roman Catholic-style liturgy began to take root in the United States, Episcopal cathedrals began to appear. With a devoted high churchman as its bishop (Quintard), the Diocese of Tennessee became an early adopter of this trend.

Relief center during 1878 yellow fever epidemic

Memphis suffered periodic epidemics of yellow fever, a mosquito-borne hemorrhagic viral infection (related to dengue fever and Ebola) throughout the 19th century. The worst of the epidemics occurred in the summer of 1878, when 5,150 Memphians died and the fast-growing city lost its charter due to depopulation. Five years earlier, a group of Episcopal nuns from the recently formed Sisters of St. Mary (now the Community of St. Mary) were invited by Bishop Quintard to come to Memphis and take over operation of the St. Mary's School for Girls, now called St. Mary's Episcopal School, which had been relocated to the cathedral site.^[3]

When the 1878 epidemic struck, a number of priests and nuns (both Protestant and Catholic), physicians, and even a bordello owner, Annie Cook, stayed behind to tend to the sick and dying, despite the high risk of contracting the disease, which often resulted in a painful death. St. Mary's had become a relief center, staffed by the Sisters of St. Mary and Episcopal priests from various parishes. The nuns' superior, Sister Constance, along with three other nuns and two priests, died at the cathedral from yellow fever. They are known throughout the Anglican Communion as "Constance and Her Companions" or, informally, the "Martyrs of Memphis". Added to the Episcopal Church's Lesser Feasts and Fasts in 1981, their feast day (September 9) commemorates their sacrifices.

A traditional Anglican prayer memorializes the martyrs in this way:

We give thee thanks and praise, O God of compassion, for the Heroic witness of Constance and her companions, who, in a time of plague and pestilence, were steadfast in their care for the sick and the dying, and loved not their own lives, even unto death. Inspire in us a like love and commitment to those in need, following the example of our Savior Jesus Christ...

Constance and Her Companions

• Sister Constance (née Caroline Louise Darling, born Medway, Massachusetts, 1846), sister superior, headmistress of St. Mary's School for Girls.
• Sister Thecla, sacristan of St. Mary's Cathedral and its school chapel, instructor in music and grammar (English and Latin)
• Sister Ruth, nurse at Trinity Infirmary, New York
• Sister Frances, a newly professed nun given charge of the Church Home orphanage
• The Rev. Charles Carroll Parsons, rector of both Grace Church and St. Lazarus Church, Memphis; former U.S. Army artillery commander, West Point alumnus and professor; served with classmate Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer in Kansas, defense counsel in Custer's 1867 court-martial trial.
• The Rev. Louis S. Schuyler, newly ordained assistant rector at Parsons' prior parish, Holy Innocents Episcopal Church, Hoboken, New Jersey

The Very Rev. George Harris, dean of the cathedral, survived his bout with yellow fever, as did Sister Hughetta (née Snowden), who immediately succeeded Constance as sister superior and remained head of the order's work in Tennessee until 1925.^[4]

"New" cathedral building, 1926

Construction of its present Gothic Revival structure began in 1898 and was completed in 1926, when the parenthetical phrase "(Gailor Memorial)" was appended to the cathedral's formal name in honor of the Rt. Rev. Thomas Frank Gailor, Bishop of Tennessee and president of the National Council of the Episcopal Church.

Response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

King memorial at Westminster Abbey

The second historic/tragic event that St. Mary's Cathedral attempted to mitigate was the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. two miles from the church. The day after King's death, Memphis clergy from many churches and synagogues met at the cathedral. In an impromptu move, Dean William Dimmick (later Bishop of Northern Michigan and co-author of certain rites in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer) took up the cathedral's processional cross and led the assembled ministers down Poplar Avenue to City Hall to petition Mayor Henry C. Loeb to end the labor standoff that King was in town to help negotiate. (The sanitation workers were protesting unsafe conditions, abusive white supervisors, low wages and the city government's refusal to recognize their union). Nearly half of the cathedral's membership left during the following months, many in protest against Dimmick's gesture of racial unity.

Like Constance and her companions, King was added to the Episcopal Church's Calendar of Saints, where he is commemorated on April 4 (or, as an alternate date, January 15). Elsewhere in the Anglican Communion, King is memorialized with a statue over the western entrance of Westminster Abbey, along with nine other 20th-century martyrs.

Sisters of St. Mary at Memphis

Sisters' Chapel and St. Mary's School, 1900
Monastery information
Other names	St. Mary's School for Girls, Church Home
Order	Community of St. Mary (Episcopal) founded in New York, NY, 1865 as the "Sisterhood of St. Mary"
Established	1873, at request of Bishop Charles Quintard
Disestablished	1910, when the sisters formally moved to St. Mary's on the Mountain Convent, Sewanee, Tennessee
Mother house	Mount St. Gabriel Convent, Peerskill, New York
Diocese	Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee
People
Founder(s)	Sister Constance, superior at Memphis; Sister Harriet, founder and mother superior, Sisterhood of St. Mary
Important associated figures	Constance and her Companions (yellow fever martyrs listed in the Episcopal Calendar of Saints)
Site
Location	On the close of St. Mary's Cathedral, Memphis, Tennessee
Visible remains	Sisters' Chapel (on the cathedral close), original New York 1865 Sisters' altar (in the cathedral nave), group grave marker of yellow fever martyrs at Elmwood Cemetery
Public access	Today, a number of St. Mary's Cathedral members (men and women, lay and ordained) are also associates of the Community of St. Mary: people who commit themselves to follow a personal "rule of life".

Diocese of West Tennessee

Episcopal Diocese of West Tennessee

The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee spanned the entire state until 1982, when it began a partition, which had been in the planning process for about five years, based on the State of Tennessee's three Grand Divisions. The Episcopal Diocese of West Tennessee was created in 1982, with St. Mary's retained as its cathedral church. The continuing Diocese of Tennessee was again split in 1985 when the Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee was formed.^[5]

Prior to then, in the 1960s and 1970s, the statewide diocese actually operated three offices with diocesan bishop John Vander Horst, coadjutor bishop William E. Sanders, and suffragan bishop W. Fred Gates, Jr. stationed in each of the three regions of the state, to serve churches throughout the state more efficiently. Gates maintained offices at the cathedral from 1966 until his 1982 retirement, which occurred shortly before the beginning of the then-new West Tennessee diocese.

Each of the three realigned dioceses retained an important legacy of the old statewide body: West Tennessee had St. Mary's Cathedral; the diocese in Middle Tennessee retained the name "Diocese of Tennessee" and the status as the Episcopal Church's sixteenth diocese; and the East Tennessee diocese welcomed Bishop William Evan Sanders, eighth bishop of Tennessee, as its own first bishop. (Sanders served as the dean of St. Mary's from 1947 until 1961, when he became bishop coadjutor and moved to Knoxville to help manage the statewide diocese's work in East Tennessee.)

Ironically, while St. Mary's was the South's first Episcopal cathedral, Tennessee's other two cathedrals, Christ Church (Nashville) and St. John's in Knoxville are both older parishes, having been organized in 1829 with the original formation of the Diocese of Tennessee.