Jay Cooke and the Church He Built

The stone church beside you was founded by Jay Cooke, a man later called the financier of the Civil War. Cooke made his fortune in Philadelphia banking and, during the war, masterminded the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars in Union government bonds to ordinary citizens, pioneering the public bond drive. The cash those bonds raised kept the Union army paid and in the field.

Cooke founded Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Cheltenham Township, and it dates to eighteen sixty-one, the very year the war began. Noted Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer later refined the structure. Cooke died in nineteen oh five and is buried in the church cemetery, which was laid out in eighteen seventy-nine. His mausoleum stands among the graves of other prominent residents of this community he helped shape.