Even though St. Thomas’s observes 1842 as its founding year, the story began in 1835 when the Rev. George Allen, an Episcopal priest, came to Newark to teach classics at Delaware College. He occasionally held services in the University of Delaware building now known as Old College, for the nearest Episcopal church, St. James, Mill Creek, was eight miles away. By 1842 Allen and a group of laymen decided that is was time to form an Episcopal church in Newark, to join the Methodist and Presbyterian congregations already present.

The next step was to build a church–but what sort of building? Some would have been content with a simple structure, but George Allen had other ideas. This is where the story, and the original St. Thomas’s, located at the corner of Delaware Avenue and South Main Street, become interesting. For many years the Episcopal church had emphasized the Protestant side of the Anglican tradition—church buildings and worship were simple and restrained. But beginning in the 1830s some clergy and laypeople, first in England and then in the United States, wanted to revitalize the church by reviving its pre-Reformation heritage, introducing more color, ceremony, and music into worship. For church buildings, the reformers turned to the Gothic style of architecture. This is known as the Oxford or Tractarian movement. There was great debate over these new ideas, for they went to the core of what it meant to be Anglican or Episcopalian. Delaware’s bishop, the Rt. Rev. Alfred Lee, did not approve of them.

But George Allen and several vestry members did support the new ideas, and they wanted their new church building to reflect them. Through his mentor, the bishop of Maryland, Allen contacted Richard Upjohn, a leading Gothic revival architect. Upjohn, who designed Trinity Church in New York, provided a drawing of a simple Gothic-style church that would meet the needs of a small congregation in a small town.

There was some discussion over which plan to build—Upjohn’s design or a simpler building. George Allen and his supporters prevailed. The first portion of the church was erected and consecrated in 1845. It served the congregation for over a century. The building still stands today, not in its original use, but beautifully restored by the University of Delaware as Bayard Sharp Hall. An early example of Gothic revival architecture, the building is on the National Register of Historic Places.