Rt. Reverend Thomas Atkinson, 1862-1881, 1992

Reverend Thomas Atkinson (1807-1881) was born on August 06, 1807 in Virginia. He attended Yale University and Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, before becoming an ordained Episcopal priest in 1837. He served at churches in Virginia and Maryland, incuding at St. Paul's Church in Norfolk and Lynchurbug, Virginia, before he was elected the third Bishop of North Carolina in 1853. As bishop, Atkinson founded the Ravenscroft Theology Training School in Asheville, North Carolina and a boys church school in Raleigh. He accepted the rectorship of St. James Parish in 1862 following the death of Reverend Drane and served until 1864. During the Civil War, he aligned the Episcopal Church of North Carolina in support of the Confederacy and supported the creation of a separate Episcopal Confederate church. Atkinson grew up on a plantation and later enslaved people of his own. Though not against slavery, he eventually freed those for whom he'd been responsible. After the Civil War, he was in favor of and helped in the unification of the church, which had split in 1861. To mend race relations, Atkinson turned over control of Black Episcopal churches to Black clergymen in 1866. In 1868, he opened an Episcopal school for newly freed Black students near Raleigh that would go on to become St. Augustine's College, a historically Black and Christian college still in existence today. Atkinson died on January 4, 1881 and was buried in the church of St. James Parish in Wilmington, North Carolina.