Going yet again through the first Vestry Minutes (this time with stronger cheaters for this cramped and faded script), I found, just before the resolution to hire a key building employee, the first sexton James Cragg, the decision to hire the first organist, “Darley [W.H.W. Darley],” at a salary of $200—three months after St. Stephen’s had been consecrated on February 27, 1823, and well before the installation of their inaugural Hall & Erben in 1825-6. Does his top billing before the sexton suggest his importance? Mr. Darley almost surely played the rented organ (a small chamber organ?) that turns up in the interim!

Onward—

—Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator