Origin of Church of the Redeemer

During 1840 , when there were only four or five families in early Cairo who were communicates in the Episcopal Church, occasional services were conducted in a little chapel in one of the Holbrook houses, by J.P.T. Ingraham.  By 1857, with considerable growth in the population of Cairo, a movement began to organize a church.

The Church of the Redeemer (Episcopal) traces its beginning with a December 1, 1840 letter from Rt. Rev. Philander Chase, Bishop of Illinois, to J.P.T. Ingraham, appointing him “a lay reader among the Episcopalians of Cairo.”  At a meeting on April 18, 1841, with the Bishop presiding the Parochial Association of Christ Church Cairo was formed and was followed by the organization of the Church of the Redeemer on November 3, 1862, and incorporated on April 25, 1864 under the title “Rector, Wardens, and Vestrymen of the Church of the Redeemer, Cairo, Illinois.”