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Anderson
“An Engineer's Dream” –
John Staunton and the Mission
of St. Mary the Virgin, Sagada
WILLIAM HENRY SCOTT
When the newly converted peoples of the Mountain Province speak of a
Christian community, they mean one in which the younger generation is
baptized, public education is available, and there are plenty of houses with
galvanizediron roofing. The adjective they most frequently apply to such a
community is “progressive.” By these standards, the Igorot municipality of
Sagada in western Bontoc SubProvince qualifies as a veritable model.
Here, more than half a population only three generations removed from
raw headtaking paganism are baptized and support their own rector in
their own parish church. A people who in igoo could boast only three men
able to write their names now enjoy two of the best primary schools in the
province and a high school that recently ranked ninth in the whle nation,
and send more than 500 of their children hundreds of miles away to college
every year. Old men who as youths carried Sagada's first G.I. sheets up
from the lowlands can now look out over acres of tin roofs on a hospital,
church, chapels, public buildings, stores, and hundreds of private
dwellings, not lacking even a scattered few with electricity, running water,
and flush toilets. To visitors from the lowlands the town appears fit for a
mountaintop idyll with neat, clean streets and fresh, pineclad environs,
and those with a background of Rousseau are tempted to fancies of a pure
and primal Christianity superimposed on a noble and innocent savagery.
It might seem an unwarranted fondness to name any one man as the
author of changes so profound, and yet in Sagada's case the pattern was set
and the fabric constructed through the single willed if not singlehanded
efforts of one pioneer missionary. It was in recognition of this fact that the
sobriquet, “an engineer's dream,” was first applied to this Episcopal church
mission by he Rev. Vincent V. H. Gowen in his 1939 Philippine
Kaleidoscope, in which he wrote of the man and the mission in the
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STUDIES IN PHILIPPINE CHURCH HISTORY©1969. Edited by Gerald H. Anderson
following terms :
The Rev. John Armitage Staunton, Jr., was not only a priest; he was
an engineer.1 He planned with the boldness of an engineer . . . .
Without exaggeration the Mission of St. Mary the Virgin can be said to
have been built to a blueprint. It was not, as is usually the case, the
product of casual, even accidental, growth. Fr. Staunton was carrying
it in his mind when he and Mrs. Staunton first settled in the squalor of
a goat shed twelve feet square and in these cramped quarters taught
school, treated the sick, offered divine worship, and baptized more than
a hundred converts. Such were Sagada's simple beginnings, but the
blueprint projected a great industrial mission occupying a whole
countryside and beginning with the external direction of a primitive
people, all that was believed possible at first, and proceeding to the
internal direction of their children who, it was hoped, would be better
fitted by education to receive it.2
That was in April 1905, and before the year was out the old goat shed
was replaced by a grassthatched house of reeds only slightly less humble,
which the Stauntons shared for the next six years with twelve Filipino boys
and girls as wards. Mrs. Staunton was a trained nurse who went around
the town making house calls, and quickly set a pattern of compassion that
has become legendary by venturing out at night in tropical storms on
horseback. Father Staunton conducted two services daily, gave instruction
in hymn singing and devotional exercises to almost 40 Christians and
pagans, and made trips to neighboring villages to invite people to Christian
worship in the municipal center. Having established his ministry, he then
turned his attention to that engineer's dream – the vision of a progressive
community growing up around the mission church like a pioneer
settlement in colonial America, until it included sturdy pine buildings with
limestone foundations to house shops, stores, and schools. The initial stage
would be the erection of an industrial plant for the double purpose of
providing steady employment and incentive for natives to learn new trades
and raise their living standards, and of making the mission itself
eventually selfsupporting. The Christian faith would meanwhile be firmly
established on AngloCatholic lines by surrounding the Sacraments with
aweinspiring beauty and ceremony, and by bringing their benefits as soon
as possible to the people without the delay of long instruction in complex
Western theology and Elizabethan English.
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STUDIES IN PHILIPPINE CHURCH HISTORY©1969. Edited by Gerald H. Anderson
The local living standards which Father Staunton hoped to raise were
simple in the extreme. The people of Sagada subsisted off rice from
irrigated terraces carved out of precipitous slopes, or on sweet potatoes
grown by a farming technique which completely denuded the
mountainsides of foliage. Few vegetables were known; meat was enjoyed in
the form of chickens and pigs at the time of religious sacrifices; and diet
was varied seasonally by tiny fish and shellfish, snails, insects,
mushrooms, berries, fruit, and birds, with hunters occasionally taking a
deer or wild boar. Clothing consisted of Gstrings and wraparound skirts of
barkcloth or cotton, and thin blankets handloomed of thread carried up
from the lowlands provided warmth in temperatures that dropped to below
50° at night. Almost all work was accomplished with a kind of large jungle
knife or machete (which had only recently served also as a weapon), and
some ironshod sticks as agricultural tools. Beyond this, a few clay pots,
wooden bowls and utensils, bamboo containers, and woven baskets made up
a household inventory so restricted a scissors showed up as a rather
sophisticated instrument. Low windowless houses with tall thatched roofs
were closed up tight against the cold nights, and smoke rose up to holes
under the ridgepole, providing warmth and dryness, preventing the mildew
of grain stored in the attic, imparting an ebon patina to all household
objects, and causing the eyes of the old folks to be rheumy and redrimmed.
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STUDIES IN PHILIPPINE CHURCH HISTORY©1969. Edited by Gerald H. Anderson
importing lowland workers to train the local people had borne fruit: 14
native stonemasons were employed under a Japanese foreman, an Igorot
boy was skillfully occupied in ful]time manufacture and care of stone
chisels, and a Chandler & Price job press was being operated by one of the
boys the Stauntons had originally taken into their home. The next year
Father Staunton's enterprises had become so vast that the annual report of
the Mission of St. Mary the Virgin covered 21 printed pages in the
Convocation Journal and was written by eight different people.
By 1915, just ten years after the Stauntons first settled in Sagada, the
mission was already known as one of the outstanding achievements of the
American occupation of the Philippine Islands. Visitors intrepid enough to
reach the savage heights of the Cordillera Central on horseback could stand
on the Stauntons' stone verandah and look down in dumbfounded
amazement at 80 acres of activities connected by 20 miles of telephone
wire. Four stone quarries were in operation and two limekilns; long lines of
Igorots carried lumber in from the sawmill, and a planing mill reduced it to
timber, boards, and shingles; electriclighted gasolinepowered machine
and carpenter shops turned out tools and furnishings. Sweet spring water
was piped into the compound under sufficient pressure to make coiled fire
hoses practical in many of the zo buildings which housed the shops, stores,
supplies, and considerable herd of cows, waterbuffalo, and horses.
Vegetables were grown by schoolboys and professional gardeners; the
mission employed a shoemaker, tailor, and laundress; and schoolgirls were
already producing salable lace and handwoven cloth. Photographs of the
day (developed and printed locally) show American lady missionaries with
pompadours pouring tea at wicker tables in rosetrellised gardens, and
Father Staunton himself dictated letters to a secretary on stationary
printed on his own press in an office with three telephones on his desk.
Fifty apprentices were under industrial training and 150 others on the
payroll; 175 school children were receiving instruction, and the beautiful
frame church where daily services were conducted listed 2,000 baptisms
and 60o communicants, all of whom were privileged to make purchases in
the Igorot Exchange whose $10,000 worth of stock had been hauled in on
bull carts over a trail surveyed by the priestincharge himself.
But the most thrilling aspect of the view from the Stauntons' front porch
was the promise of things to come. Already discernible were the massive
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STUDIES IN PHILIPPINE CHURCH HISTORY©1969. Edited by Gerald H. Anderson
foundations of the great stone church which was to be the engineerpriest's
crowning achievement nine years in the buildingwhose altar was to
become the wellspring of a new way of life, whose cross was to rise like a
beacon above the heads of pagans seeking a better goal, and whose tower
clock was to symbolize the changes that would accompany the process. It
was this cathedrallike Christian temple towering above the grass roofs of
Sagada which would refocus the attention of the younger generation from
the sacred trees that were the center of their ancestors' worship, and
replace the old seasonal, pigsacrificing vengeanceceremonies in their
affections with the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This
patronal fiesta on December 8 quickly became the big event of the year for
the new Sagada.
In preparation for the event, a lowlander was hired a month or, two in
advance to make the plans, to rehearse the amateur dramatists in the
moromoro or zarzuela to be presented, and to contribute such entertaining
stunts himself as sending aloft a lighted hotair balloon at night. Sentinels
were stationed down the trail to give warning of the bishop's approach, and
he, vested in cope and mitre, would be met by a throng of rejoicing
Christians, and escorted into the compound in procession to the sound of
pealing bells and a lusty handcranked siren in the church tower. First
Vespers on December 7 was followed by a program in the social hall in
which one of the American missionaries played the reed organ or
lowlanders played mandolins while the little Igorot school children joined in
the Virginia Reel and other dances that went on into the middle of the
night. Ilocanostyle refreshments were served, and the genteel culture to
which the new society aspired was indicated by programs printed in
English and Spanish, and a formal Rigodón de Honor danced by the
lowlanders present. Before the main service of the fiesta, the Virgin's
statue was carried around the church in solemn procession, and after the
festive Mass, visiting Christians and athletes from villages with
outstations began playing softball, basketball, and volleyball, with men of
the town sometimes coming up to look on and to engage in a tugofwar.
Food was served after the noon Angelus, pealing of bells and firing of
bombas y morteretes; the Second Vespers was followed by another program,
with still more games following Mass on the 9th, and, finally, a program for
the distribution of such prizes as pencils, notebooks, handkerchiefs, and
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STUDIES IN PHILIPPINE CHURCH HISTORY©1969. Edited by Gerald H. Anderson
camisetas.
This annual fiesta, in its rich Catholic ceremonial and churchorientecl
focus, its American games, Spanish dances, and Ilocano cooking, and its
attendance by Igorot children not living under their parents' custody or
according to their customs, rather nicely summed up Father Staunton's
program for converting and civilizing Sagada. As he himself phrased it,
“There is no hope for the Christianized savage who does not want to be
cleaner in body, better clothed, better fed, better housed, better educated,
more industrious, and to push his children upwards by giving them the
advantages which were denied to him.”3 The Igorot Exchange, with its
eyeglasses, Colgate toothpaste, and select clientele, helped “to inoculate
him with the germ of discontent, to establish in his system cravings,
desires, and necessities which his savage and heathen life cannot satisfy.” 4
Part of this program was an educational regimen which kept children in
school twelve months a year. “They must stay in our dormitories,” the
principal explained, “until living like an Igorot becomes for them an
impossibility.”5 It was not inappropriate that the citation of the honorary
doctor's degree awarded Father Staunton by St. Stephen's College in 1923
read, “For distinguished service to civilization in the Philippine Islands.”
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STUDIES IN PHILIPPINE CHURCH HISTORY©1969. Edited by Gerald H. Anderson
trustworthy on those dangerous trails Mrs. Staunton used to frequent on
her errands of mercy; the school principal once hiked in from an outstation
with a broken jaw and collarbone after her horse had carried her off the
side of the mountain. Galling frustrations in obtaining men and materials
added to the tensions of a group of dedicated, strongwilled Americans
bound together by social isolation from the community in which they lived,
and some of Father Staunton's subordinates departed abruptly.
If Father Staunton's ability to raise up a buzzing industrial plant out of
pristine limestone seemed magical, his ability to raise the necessary funds
was no less remarkable. On his first furlough, his old parish gave him
$1,000, another church $2,000, and a lady in Philadelphia wrote out a
check for yet another $1,000, while alumni of his class in the Columbia
School of Mines promised $6,000 for a hospital. In addition to the gifts he
received personally, a speaking tour in 1916 resulted in more than $21,000
passing through the mission office as “specials” for Sagada the next year.
An old mission bookkeeper remembers regular Christmas gifts of $1,000
and once entered a single check in the amount of $10,000, but Father
Staunton also received smaller donations such as $10 from the United
States Shoe Company in Manila and $4.35 from the township of Sabangan
toward his proposed high school. His ingenuity left no stone unturned.
When ordering a “Gammeter Multigraph” he asked for a discount on the
grounds that it would be the first of its kind in the islands where, as
Postmaster of Sagada, he would gladly demonstrate it to passersby, and
near his desk he kept a shelfful of social registers with the names of
Episcopalians underlined.
The churchmen who made these contributions felt amply rewarded by
the joy of participating in the great spiritual adventure which Father
Staunton's mission was. For years he answered with long letters in his own
hand, and for more years his press turned out such a stream of postcards,
pictures, prayer cards, leaflets, and pamphlets that he and his work
became the bestknown mission in the Episcopal church. A whole
generation of missionminded Episcopalians thrilled to Father Staunton's
colorful reports written on stationary with naked spearbrandishing
savages on the letter head, and which often included pictures of little boys
in Gstrings operating modern machinery or a selfaddressed form to be
filled out and returned with the names of other Americans who might be
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STUDIES IN PHILIPPINE CHURCH HISTORY©1969. Edited by Gerald H. Anderson
interested. Episcopalians traveling in the United States could expect to run
across fellow churchmen who shared this common involvement in Father
Staunton's work, and could even see the results of their efforts flashed on
the silent screen of a newsreel theater above the caption, “The most
wonderful missionary work done by any Christian body anywhere.”6
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STUDIES IN PHILIPPINE CHURCH HISTORY©1969. Edited by Gerald H. Anderson
for a decade was consecrated on December 8, 1921, and a small army of
laborers, stonemasons, carpenters, machine operators, mechanics, carters
and printers could find no new employer for their skills. Projects then
under development like the combined hospital and high school (which was
able to function as neither) would aggravate rather than relieve the
financial pressure. The decision by the government to limit its own
construction in Bontoc deprived the sawmill of its last market, and
negotiations to sell the equipment itself came to naught. Attempts to cut
the prices of merchandise by the operation of a store and establishment of a
transportation line depended on the purchases of the 15 Caucasians
resident in Sagada, which Father Staunton in desperation soberly
recommended as a “vital reason why our staff should not be reduced.”9 The
final blow came with the adoption of a new church policy whereby all
mission work would be supported directly by a central office, and no further
private appeals would be permitted. The policy was designed to redress
such disproportions as a domestic missionary district's being operated at
six or eight times the scale of a selfsupporting diocese, a condition which
seemed almost to penalize progress to a diocesan status, but it was also a
kind of fatal handwriting on the wall for such highly personalized
enterprises as Father Staunton's.
The firm conviction that he knew what was best for Sagada which had
moved Father Staunton to keep accounts like thc chancellor of exchequer of
some sovereign domain also characterized his relations with his episcopal
superiors. When Bishop Gouverneur Frank Mosher took oversight for the
district in 1920, he was startled to find that the Sagada payroll exceeded
all other diocesan expenses, while the only Anglican house of worship in
the metropolitan center of Baguio, for instance, was in such a state of
imminent collapse that its priest considered it too dangerous to house the
Reserved Sacrament. But his attempts to redeploy the forces canonically at
his disposal soon took on the aspects of a private war with Father
Staunton, in which the pioneer missionary, seven years his senior, would
speak of “my work” and “your work,” and accuse him of snuffing out the life
of one station to support the work of others that had already demonstrated
their lethargy. Moreover, Father Staunton's devotion to AngloCatholic
forms of worship were, at sixty, as rigid as ever and less likely to change,
and the fact that other Philippine stations did not conform to Sagada
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STUDIES IN PHILIPPINE CHURCH HISTORY©1969. Edited by Gerald H. Anderson
This was not the first time that Father Staunton had offered his
resignation, but the only time it had been accepted, he promptly
reconsidered. Now, in July 1924, he gave notice that he would not return for
another term of duty, and requested transfer to another station where he
would not have to witness the eclipse of Sagada's glory, and in September
unambiguously stated, “I must ask to be relieved of all that heavy
responsibility which I carry as PriestinCharge of this group of Missions
not later than December 31st, 1924.”10 As reasons, he named lack of
financial support from the church in the United States and moral support
from the bishop in the field, and attempted to dramatize these accusations
by a sober recommendation that the work of the Episcopal Church in
Sagada be handed over to the Roman Catholics. Bishop Mosher's prompt
response was equally unambiguous: he accepted the resignation and cabled
the details to New York.
It is hard to believe that Father Staunton was really prepared to leave
that home whose beams and stones had been hewn out of a pagan
wilderness according to his own plans by workmen he himself had baptized
and trained. He had always spoken of his desire to die among his beloved
people, and now he began one last struggle to stay among them. Pressure
was brought to bear on Bishop Mosher both in the United States and in the
Philippines; telegrams of protest were originated by Igorots in Sagada, a
furloughing staff missionary frankly campaigned among influential
churchmen at home, and Father Staunton himself cabled New York that it
was rumored that Bishop Mosher was going to resign. A special
“Committee on Sagada” set up at church headquarters, however, concluded
that further delay would seriously embarrass the bishop's authority and in
December notified Father Staunton, “Your resignation and retirement from
Sagada is regarded by the Department of Missions as an accomplished fact
and final.”11
For twenty years Father Staunton had run what in the Navy would be
called “a taut ship,” and although he considered himself a commander
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STUDIES IN PHILIPPINE CHURCH HISTORY©1969. Edited by Gerald H. Anderson
relieved of his command before making port, to the people of Sagada he will
always be the Good Captain who successfully set their course out of the
past and into the present. The readiness with which resistance to his will
crumbled, the dignity with which he conducted his priesthood and the aura
of sacred mystery which he imparted to the sanctuary of his church, his
aloofness from village affairs and failure to lay hands on the Igorots' pigs,
chickens, or women, all enhanced his godlike reputation in local eyes for
multiplying Sagada prosperity, and he is remembered by pagan old
gentlemen today as the greatest public benefactor since Biag, a deified
seventeenthcentury founding father with a King Midas touch. The present
governor of the Mountain Province remembers having been held up as a
child to see the great man, and the suffragan bishop for Northern Luzon
recalls having crouched in the bushes to look out in awe at his long legs
striding by as he paced up and down in the moonlight planning bigger and
better things for Sagada. The good food and clothes and shelter which the
people of Sagada had been praying for for generations, Father Staunton,
too, wanted for them, and Christians who as children received candy from
him at Christmastime or flour when the rice crops failed remember him
with an admiration and affection which amounts to reverence.
There is probably not a Sagadan over fifty alive today who does not
believe that Father Staunton loved them as he loved himself because he
wanted them to have good things. This is no small reputation.
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STUDIES IN PHILIPPINE CHURCH HISTORY©1969. Edited by Gerald H. Anderson
NOTES
l John Armitage Staunton, Jr., was born on April 14, 1864, in Adrian, Michigan,
where his father, a native New Yorker, was rector of Christ (Episcopal) Church.
He graduated from the Columbia School of Mines with the B.M.E. degree in
1887, earned a B.A. degree from Harvard in 1890 and then entered the General
Theological Seminary in New York. Ordained deacon and priest in the
Episcopal church in 1892, he married Eliza M. Wilkie that same year. After six
years' assisting at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York, he became
rector of St. Peter's Church in Springfield, Massachusetts, where, in 1901, he
volunteered for missionary service in the Philippine Islands. There he opened
the first Episcopal church in the Mountain Province (the Church of the
Resurrection, Baguio ), and then founded the Mission of St. Mary the Virgin
infagada, which he served as priestincharge for 20 years. Leaving the
Philippines in 1925, he took charge of St. Michael's Mission, Seattle, but gave
up his Episcopal ministry and entered the Roman Catholic Church, in which,
after his wife's death, he was ordained at the age of 70. He died in Hammond,
Indiana, in 1944, leaving no children.
2 New York, n.d. [1939?], p. 41.
3 "Sagada Report," Journal of the Ninth Annual Convocation of the Missionary
District of Philippine Islands (Manila, igia), p. 64.
4 "An OptiPessimistic Outlook," Spirit o f Missions, LXXX (November 1915), 753
54.
5 Blanche E. Masse, "Sagada Report," Journal of the Eighteenth Annual
Convocation of the Missionary District of Philippine Islands (Manila, 1924), p.
58.
6 S. C. Brock, "Work at Sagada" (letter to the Editor), The Living Church, LXXIII
(Sept. 5, 1925), 617.
7 "Sagada Report," Journal of the Third Annual Convocation of the Missionary
District of Philippine Islands (Manila, 1906), p. 44.
8 Letter from John W. Wood to the Rt. Rev. Charles Henry Brent, Jan. 2, 1919, in
the Archives of the Church Historical Society, Austin, Texas.
9 Letter to Bishop Mosher, July 9, 1924, in the Archives of the Church Historical
Society, Austin, Texas.
l0 Letter to Bishop Mosher, Sept. 24, 1924, included in "Report of the Committee
on Sagada to the National Council," in Archives of the Church Historical
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STUDIES IN PHILIPPINE CHURCH HISTORY©1969. Edited by Gerald H. Anderson
Society, Austin, Texas.
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