Our History

Bishop Francis Key Brooke came to Muskogee at the invitation of Mary Morris on February 23, 1983 to read Evening Prayer and baptize four young children. Surprised to find that the few Episcopal families that had started worshipping in a welcoming Methodist church in town had grown the community enough to fill the building, he formally started a mission in Muskogee, which would grow to become Grace Episcopal Church.

On May 1, 1984 Rev. Henry Tudor from Ferguson, MO became the first priest at Grace Church. That same year parishioner Robert L. Owen, a member of the Cherokee Nation who later would become Oklahoma's first U.S. Senator, donated property for the construction of our first church, a small building on S. 4th Street that hosted its first service on April 14, 1895.

After multiple leadership changes, we bought a new building site at the northwest corner of 6th St. and W. Broadway in August of 1903. Grace grew from 63 parishioners to 141 by the following year. On February 1, 1904 we applied to become a parish, making Grace the first fully self supported Episcopal church in Indian Territory. We began construction of a new building in May of 1905, which was finished by January of 1906. 231 parishioners gathered in the new building with a new priest, Rev. Hugh J. Llwyd, for its first service on March 1, 1906. Rev. Llwyd would serve at Grace for 35 years.

By the early 1920s we were one of the three largest Episcopal churches in Oklahoma with over 500 members, but regular flooding and noisy traffic, motivated another move. On April 25, 1922 we voted to move the building to our current location at 6th and Court, which we still call home today. Scroll down to see photos from our history as a church in Muskogee, and if you want to learn more about this history what we’ve been up to in the century since, click the button below: