an engineers dream

STUDIES IN PHILIPPINE CHURCH HISTORY©1969. Edited by Gerald H. Anderson

“An Engineer's Dream” – John Staunton and the Missionof St. Mary the Virgin, Sagada

WILLIAM HENRY SCOTT

When the newly converted peoples of the Mountain Province speak of a Christian community, they mean one in which the younger generation is baptized, public education is available, and there are plenty of houses with galvanizediron roofing. The adjective they most frequently apply to such a community is “progressive.” By these standards, the Igorot municipality of Sagada in western Bontoc SubProvince qualifies as a veritable model.

Here, more than half a population only three generations removed from raw headtaking paganism are baptized and support their own rector in their own parish church. A people who in igoo could boast only three men able to write their names now enjoy two of the best primary schools in the province and a high school that recently ranked ninth in the whle nation, and send more than 500 of their children hundreds of miles away to college every year. Old men who as youths carried Sagada's first G.I. sheets up from the lowlands can now look out over acres of tin roofs on a hospital, church, chapels, public buildings, stores, and hundreds of private dwellings, not lacking even a scattered few with electricity, running water, and flush toilets. To visitors from the lowlands the town appears fit for a mountaintop idyll with neat, clean streets and fresh, pineclad environs, and those with a background of Rousseau are tempted to fancies of a pure and primal Christianity superimposed on a noble and innocent savagery.

It might seem an unwarranted fondness to name any one man as the author of changes so profound, and yet in Sagada's case the pattern was set and the fabric constructed through the single willed if not singlehanded efforts of one pioneer missionary. It was in recognition of this fact that the sobriquet, “an engineer's dream,” was first applied to this Episcopal church mission by he Rev. Vincent V. H. Gowen in his 1939 Philippine Kaleidoscope, in which he wrote of the man and the mission in the

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following terms :

The Rev. John Armitage Staunton, Jr., was not only a priest; he was an engineer.1 He planned with the boldness of an engineer . . . . Without exaggeration the Mission of St. Mary the Virgin can be said to have been built to a blueprint. It was not, as is usually the case, the product of casual, even accidental, growth. Fr. Staunton was carrying it in his mind when he and Mrs. Staunton first settled in the squalor of a goat shed twelve feet square and in these cramped quarters taught school, treated the sick, offered divine worship, and baptized more than a hundred converts. Such were Sagada's simple beginnings, but the blueprint projected a great industrial mission occupying a whole countryside and beginning with the external direction of a primitive people, all that was believed possible at first, and proceeding to the internal direction of their children who, it was hoped, would be better fitted by education to receive it.2

That was in April 1905, and before the year was out the old goat shed was replaced by a grassthatched house of reeds only slightly less humble, which the Stauntons shared for the next six years with twelve Filipino boys and girls as wards. Mrs. Staunton was a trained nurse who went around the town making house calls, and quickly set a pattern of compassion that has become legendary by venturing out at night in tropical storms on horseback. Father Staunton conducted two services daily, gave instruction in hymn singing and devotional exercises to almost 40 Christians and pagans, and made trips to neighboring villages to invite people to Christian worship in the municipal center. Having established his ministry, he then turned his attention to that engineer's dream – the vision of a progressive community growing up around the mission church like a pioneer settlement in colonial America, until it included sturdy pine buildings with limestone foundations to house shops, stores, and schools. The initial stage would be the erection of an industrial plant for the double purpose of providing steady employment and incentive for natives to learn new trades and raise their living standards, and of making the mission itself eventually selfsupporting. The Christian faith would meanwhile be firmly established on AngloCatholic lines by surrounding the Sacraments with aweinspiring beauty and ceremony, and by bringing their benefits as soon as possible to the people without the delay of long instruction in complex Western theology and Elizabethan English.

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The local living standards which Father Staunton hoped to raise were simple in the extreme. The people of Sagada subsisted off rice from irrigated terraces carved out of precipitous slopes, or on sweet potatoes grown by a farming technique which completely denuded the mountainsides of foliage. Few vegetables were known; meat was enjoyed in the form of chickens and pigs at the time of religious sacrifices; and diet was varied seasonally by tiny fish and shellfish, snails, insects, mushrooms, berries, fruit, and birds, with hunters occasionally taking a deer or wild boar. Clothing consisted of Gstrings and wraparound skirts of barkcloth or cotton, and thin blankets handloomed of thread carried up from the lowlands provided warmth in temperatures that dropped to below 50° at night. Almost all work was accomplished with a kind of large jungleknife or machete (which had only recently served also as a weapon), and some ironshod sticks as agricultural tools. Beyond this, a few clay pots, wooden bowls and utensils, bamboo containers, and woven baskets made up a household inventory so restricted a scissors showed up as a rather sophisticated instrument. Low windowless houses with tall thatched roofs were closed up tight against the cold nights, and smoke rose up to holes under the ridgepole, providing warmth and dryness, preventing the mildew of grain stored in the attic, imparting an ebon patina to all household objects, and causing the eyes of the old folks to be rheumy and redrimmed.

Father Staunton's attack on this primitive economy began with the importation of American, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino workmen from Manila, and the construction of a waterpowered sawmill which was in operation in 1907, selling lumber to the government in Bontoc in 1908, and selfsupporting and employing 40 natives by 1912. An American physician arrived with his family in 1907, and that same year the pioneer missionary was operating a planer, a shingle mill, limekiln, and charcoal pits in addition to the sawmill itself, had opened a stone quarry, constructed a very respectable church, and was directing such diverse activities as logging, carpentering, blacksmithing, repair work, blasting, excavation, and stonecutting. In 1909 he received his first ministerial assistance, and in the same year an American schoolteacher arrived. By August the church, bell tower, office building, shop, and dispensary were shingled, and extensive sites had been leveled for a hospital and a school. When the Stauntons finally moved into a permanent Americanstyle house in 1912, the policy of

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importing lowland workers to train the local people had borne fruit: 14 native stonemasons were employed under a Japanese foreman, an Igorot boy was skillfully occupied in ful]time manufacture and care of stone chisels, and a Chandler & Price job press was being operated by one of the boys the Stauntons had originally taken into their home. The next year Father Staunton's enterprises had become so vast that the annual report of the Mission of St. Mary the Virgin covered 21 printed pages in the Convocation Journal and was written by eight different people.

By 1915, just ten years after the Stauntons first settled in Sagada, the mission was already known as one of the outstanding achievements of the American occupation of the Philippine Islands. Visitors intrepid enough to reach the savage heights of the Cordillera Central on horseback could stand on the Stauntons' stone verandah and look down in dumbfounded amazement at 80 acres of activities connected by 20 miles of telephone wire. Four stone quarries were in operation and two limekilns; long lines of Igorots carried lumber in from the sawmill, and a planing mill reduced it to timber, boards, and shingles; electriclighted gasolinepowered machine and carpenter shops turned out tools and furnishings. Sweet spring water was piped into the compound under sufficient pressure to make coiled fire hoses practical in many of the zo buildings which housed the shops, stores, supplies, and considerable herd of cows, waterbuffalo, and horses. Vegetables were grown by schoolboys and professional gardeners; the mission employed a shoemaker, tailor, and laundress; and schoolgirls were already producing salable lace and handwoven cloth. Photographs of the day (developed and printed locally) show American lady missionaries with pompadours pouring tea at wicker tables in rosetrellised gardens, and Father Staunton himself dictated letters to a secretary on stationary printed on his own press in an office with three telephones on his desk. Fifty apprentices were under industrial training and 150 others on the payroll; 175 school children were receiving instruction, and the beautiful frame church where daily services were conducted listed 2,000 baptisms and 60o communicants, all of whom were privileged to make purchases in the Igorot Exchange whose $10,000 worth of stock had been hauled in on bull carts over a trail surveyed by the priestincharge himself.

But the most thrilling aspect of the view from the Stauntons' front porch was the promise of things to come. Already discernible were the massive

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foundations of the great stone church which was to be the engineerpriest's crowning achievement nine years in the buildingwhose altar was to become the wellspring of a new way of life, whose cross was to rise like a beacon above the heads of pagans seeking a better goal, and whose tower clock was to symbolize the changes that would accompany the process. It was this cathedrallike Christian temple towering above the grass roofs of Sagada which would refocus the attention of the younger generation from the sacred trees that were the center of their ancestors' worship, and replace the old seasonal, pigsacrificing vengeanceceremonies in their affections with the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This patronal fiesta on December 8 quickly became the big event of the year for the new Sagada.

In preparation for the event, a lowlander was hired a month or, two in advance to make the plans, to rehearse the amateur dramatists in the moromoro or zarzuela to be presented, and to contribute such entertaining stunts himself as sending aloft a lighted hotair balloon at night. Sentinels were stationed down the trail to give warning of the bishop's approach, and he, vested in cope and mitre, would be met by a throng of rejoicing Christians, and escorted into the compound in procession to the sound of pealing bells and a lusty handcranked siren in the church tower. First Vespers on December 7 was followed by a program in the social hall in which one of the American missionaries played the reed organ or lowlanders played mandolins while the little Igorot school children joined in the Virginia Reel and other dances that went on into the middle of the night. Ilocanostyle refreshments were served, and the genteel culture to which the new society aspired was indicated by programs printed in English and Spanish, and a formal Rigodón de Honor danced by the lowlanders present. Before the main service of the fiesta, the Virgin's statue was carried around the church in solemn procession, and after the festive Mass, visiting Christians and athletes from villages with outstations began playing softball, basketball, and volleyball, with men of the town sometimes coming up to look on and to engage in a tugofwar. Food was served after the noon Angelus, pealing of bells and firing of bombas y morteretes; the Second Vespers was followed by another program, with still more games following Mass on the 9th, and, finally, a program for the distribution of such prizes as pencils, notebooks, handkerchiefs, and

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camisetas.

This annual fiesta, in its rich Catholic ceremonial and churchorientecl focus, its American games, Spanish dances, and Ilocano cooking, and its attendance by Igorot children not living under their parents' custody or according to their customs, rather nicely summed up Father Staunton's program for converting and civilizing Sagada. As he himself phrased it, “There is no hope for the Christianized savage who does not want to be cleaner in body, better clothed, better fed, better housed, better educated, more industrious, and to push his children upwards by giving them the advantages which were denied to him.”3 The Igorot Exchange, with its eyeglasses, Colgate toothpaste, and select clientele, helped “to inoculate him with the germ of discontent, to establish in his system cravings, desires, and necessities which his savage and heathen life cannot satisfy.”4

Part of this program was an educational regimen which kept children in school twelve months a year. “They must stay in our dormitories,” the principal explained, “until living like an Igorot becomes for them an impossibility.”5 It was not inappropriate that the citation of the honorary doctor's degree awarded Father Staunton by St. Stephen's College in 1923 read, “For distinguished service to civilization in the Philippine Islands.”

Life in Sagada, however, was not always so placid as it might have appeared before the great fireplace in Father Staunton's booklined sala, and he and his colleagues had to face many discomforts and not a little danger. Seasonal storms could create lakes forty feet deep amidst craggy hills, drive through walls to destroy books and foodstuffs, and carry away roofs, bridges, communication lines and even whole sections of the sawmill. Basic necessities required by the American way of life had to be hauled in over two mountain ranges, and supplies of flour and tinned milk, salmon, and baked beans were expensive and unavailable when Sagada was cut off for weeks at a time by typhoons or landslides. With neither a resident physician nor medical laboratory available, one missionary died of intestinal parasites diagnosed too late, leaving her fellow workers to wonder uneasily about their own physical condition. New and enthusiastic appointees came out with no more training or knowledge of what to expect than reading Father Staunton's tracts and exposure to his personal magnetism, and natives of East Coast cities sometimes arrived without even knowing how to sit a horse. Horses themselves were not always

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trustworthy on those dangerous trails Mrs. Staunton used to frequent on her errands of mercy; the school principal once hiked in from an outstation with a broken jaw and collarbone after her horse had carried her off the side of the mountain. Galling frustrations in obtaining men and materials added to the tensions of a group of dedicated, strongwilled Americans bound together by social isolation from the community in which they lived, and some of Father Staunton's subordinates departed abruptly.

If Father Staunton's ability to raise up a buzzing industrial plant out of pristine limestone seemed magical, his ability to raise the necessary funds was no less remarkable. On his first furlough, his old parish gave him $1,000, another church $2,000, and a lady in Philadelphia wrote out a check for yet another $1,000, while alumni of his class in the Columbia School of Mines promised $6,000 for a hospital. In addition to the gifts he received personally, a speaking tour in 1916 resulted in more than $21,000 passing through the mission office as “specials” for Sagada the next year. An old mission bookkeeper remembers regular Christmas gifts of $1,000 and once entered a single check in the amount of $10,000, but Father Staunton also received smaller donations such as $10 from the United States Shoe Company in Manila and $4.35 from the township of Sabangan toward his proposed high school. His ingenuity left no stone unturned. When ordering a “Gammeter Multigraph” he asked for a discount on the grounds that it would be the first of its kind in the islands where, as Postmaster of Sagada, he would gladly demonstrate it to passersby, and near his desk he kept a shelfful of social registers with the names of Episcopalians underlined.

The churchmen who made these contributions felt amply rewarded by the joy of participating in the great spiritual adventure which Father Staunton's mission was. For years he answered with long letters in his own hand, and for more years his press turned out such a stream of postcards, pictures, prayer cards, leaflets, and pamphlets that he and his work became the bestknown mission in the Episcopal church. A whole generation of missionminded Episcopalians thrilled to Father Staunton's colorful reports written on stationary with naked spearbrandishing savages on the letter head, and which often included pictures of little boys in Gstrings operating modern machinery or a selfaddressed form to be filled out and returned with the names of other Americans who might be

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interested. Episcopalians traveling in the United States could expect to run across fellow churchmen who shared this common involvement in Father Staunton's work, and could even see the results of their efforts flashed on the silent screen of a newsreel theater above the caption, “The most wonderful missionary work done by any Christian body anywhere.”6

Yet Father Staunton's magic as a fundraising visionary was not matched by corresponding fiscal acumen, and the dreams from that grand blueprint often inspired him to juggle funds about as required by the existential situation in Sagada in the firm conviction that “there is not a shadow of a doubt that there are as many friends and funds for our work hidden away in the American church as we need.”7 In 1918, he built a building for a postoffice and when the Government refused to pay the rent he asked, moved the printing press into it and charged the cost to an appropriation earmark for a technical high school, and from this same source he withdrew funds to send back to the United States two laymen whom he had personally brought out but for whom no salaries could be obtained. An official visitor from mission headquarters in New York reported the following year, “I was astonished to find that he was completing a hospital building with funds given for the technical high school on the ground that a part of the hospital would be used, temporarily at all events, for the high school and that later he hoped to make an appeal for a hospital, reimburse the technical high school funds and then erect a separate hospital building.”8

News of America's declaration of war on Germany in 1917 was quickly followed in Sagada by a cable from Sears, Roebuck & Company that $325 worth of goods ordered would now cost $475, which was only a foretaste of the disappointments to come. The expectations of increased giving began to fade away in the intensity of America's involvement in her first European war, and no new salaries were forthcoming for faculty or industrial workers. Plans for a high school were set aside, a proposed hydroelectric plant had to be abandoned, all power equipment was stilled by the high cost of fuel oil, and Father Staunton found himself with two nurses, without a doctor or a hospital, and an engineer, an electrician, and an industrial foreman with neither power nor machinery. Ironically, Sagada's own progress made the position untenable without increased funds. That magnificent edifice whose construction had provided steady employment

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for a decade was consecrated on December 8, 1921, and a small army of laborers, stonemasons, carpenters, machine operators, mechanics, carters and printers could find no new employer for their skills. Projects then under development like the combined hospital and high school (which was able to function as neither) would aggravate rather than relieve the financial pressure. The decision by the government to limit its own construction in Bontoc deprived the sawmill of its last market, and negotiations to sell the equipment itself came to naught. Attempts to cut the prices of merchandise by the operation of a store and establishment of a transportation line depended on the purchases of the 15 Caucasians resident in Sagada, which Father Staunton in desperation soberly recommended as a “vital reason why our staff should not be reduced.”9 The final blow came with the adoption of a new church policy whereby all mission work would be supported directly by a central office, and no further private appeals would be permitted. The policy was designed to redress such disproportions as a domestic missionary district's being operated at six or eight times the scale of a selfsupporting diocese, a condition which seemed almost to penalize progress to a diocesan status, but it was also a kind of fatal handwriting on the wall for such highly personalized enterprises as Father Staunton's.

The firm conviction that he knew what was best for Sagada which had moved Father Staunton to keep accounts like thc chancellor of exchequer of some sovereign domain also characterized his relations with his episcopal superiors. When Bishop Gouverneur Frank Mosher took oversight for the district in 1920, he was startled to find that the Sagada payroll exceeded all other diocesan expenses, while the only Anglican house of worship in the metropolitan center of Baguio, for instance, was in such a state of imminent collapse that its priest considered it too dangerous to house the Reserved Sacrament. But his attempts to redeploy the forces canonically at his disposal soon took on the aspects of a private war with Father Staunton, in which the pioneer missionary, seven years his senior, would speak of “my work” and “your work,” and accuse him of snuffing out the life of one station to support the work of others that had already demonstrated their lethargy. Moreover, Father Staunton's devotion to AngloCatholic forms of worship were, at sixty, as rigid as ever and less likely to change, and the fact that other Philippine stations did not conform to Sagada

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standards made him challenge the bishop's overall leadership of the district. When it finally became obvious that he was not going to be able to carry out the grand blueprint of that engineer's dream, the great Christian civilizer decided to tender his resignation.

This was not the first time that Father Staunton had offered his resignation, but the only time it had been accepted, he promptly reconsidered. Now, in July 1924, he gave notice that he would not return for another term of duty, and requested transfer to another station where he would not have to witness the eclipse of Sagada's glory, and in September unambiguously stated, “I must ask to be relieved of all that heavy responsibility which I carry as PriestinCharge of this group of Missions not later than December 31st, 1924.”10 As reasons, he named lack of financial support from the church in the United States and moral support from the bishop in the field, and attempted to dramatize these accusations by a sober recommendation that the work of the Episcopal Church in Sagada be handed over to the Roman Catholics. Bishop Mosher's prompt response was equally unambiguous: he accepted the resignation and cabled the details to New York.

It is hard to believe that Father Staunton was really prepared to leave that home whose beams and stones had been hewn out of a pagan wilderness according to his own plans by workmen he himself had baptized and trained. He had always spoken of his desire to die among his beloved people, and now he began one last struggle to stay among them. Pressure was brought to bear on Bishop Mosher both in the United States and in the Philippines; telegrams of protest were originated by Igorots in Sagada, a furloughing staff missionary frankly campaigned among influential churchmen at home, and Father Staunton himself cabled New York that it was rumored that Bishop Mosher was going to resign. A special “Committee on Sagada” set up at church headquarters, however, concluded that further delay would seriously embarrass the bishop's authority and in December notified Father Staunton, “Your resignation and retirement from Sagada is regarded by the Department of Missions as an accomplished fact and final.”11

For twenty years Father Staunton had run what in the Navy would be called “a taut ship,” and although he considered himself a commander

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relieved of his command before making port, to the people of Sagada he will always be the Good Captain who successfully set their course out of the past and into the present. The readiness with which resistance to his will crumbled, the dignity with which he conducted his priesthood and the aura of sacred mystery which he imparted to the sanctuary of his church, his aloofness from village affairs and failure to lay hands on the Igorots' pigs, chickens, or women, all enhanced his godlike reputation in local eyes for multiplying Sagada prosperity, and he is remembered by pagan old gentlemen today as the greatest public benefactor since Biag, a deified seventeenthcentury founding father with a King Midas touch. The present governor of the Mountain Province remembers having been held up as a child to see the great man, and the suffragan bishop for Northern Luzon recalls having crouched in the bushes to look out in awe at his long legs striding by as he paced up and down in the moonlight planning bigger and better things for Sagada. The good food and clothes and shelter which the people of Sagada had been praying for for generations, Father Staunton, too, wanted for them, and Christians who as children received candy from him at Christmastime or flour when the rice crops failed remember him with an admiration and affection which amounts to reverence.

There is probably not a Sagadan over fifty alive today who does not believe that Father Staunton loved them as he loved himself because he wanted them to have good things. This is no small reputation.

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NOTES

l John Armitage Staunton, Jr., was born on April 14, 1864, in Adrian, Michigan, where his father, a native New Yorker, was rector of Christ (Episcopal) Church. He graduated from the Columbia School of Mines with the B.M.E. degree in 1887, earned a B.A. degree from Harvard in 1890 and then entered the General Theological Seminary in New York. Ordained deacon and priest in the Episcopal church in 1892, he married Eliza M. Wilkie that same year. After six years' assisting at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York, he became rector of St. Peter's Church in Springfield, Massachusetts, where, in 1901, he volunteered for missionary service in the Philippine Islands. There he opened the first Episcopal church in the Mountain Province (the Church of the Resurrection, Baguio ), and then founded the Mission of St. Mary the Virgin infagada, which he served as priestincharge for 20 years. Leaving the Philippines in 1925, he took charge of St. Michael's Mission, Seattle, but gave up his Episcopal ministry and entered the Roman Catholic Church, in which, after his wife's death, he was ordained at the age of 70. He died in Hammond, Indiana, in 1944, leaving no children.

2 New York, n.d. [1939?], p. 41.

3 "Sagada Report," Journal of the Ninth Annual Convocation of the Missionary District of Philippine Islands (Manila, igia), p. 64.

4 "An OptiPessimistic Outlook," Spirit o f Missions, LXXX (November 1915), 75354.

5 Blanche E. Masse, "Sagada Report," Journal of the Eighteenth Annual Convocation of the Missionary District of Philippine Islands (Manila, 1924), p. 58.

6 S. C. Brock, "Work at Sagada" (letter to the Editor), The Living Church, LXXIII (Sept. 5, 1925), 617.

7 "Sagada Report," Journal of the Third Annual Convocation of the Missionary District of Philippine Islands (Manila, 1906), p. 44.

8 Letter from John W. Wood to the Rt. Rev. Charles Henry Brent, Jan. 2, 1919, in the Archives of the Church Historical Society, Austin, Texas.

9 Letter to Bishop Mosher, July 9, 1924, in the Archives of the Church Historical Society, Austin, Texas.

l0 Letter to Bishop Mosher, Sept. 24, 1924, included in "Report of the Committee on Sagada to the National Council," in Archives of the Church Historical

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Society, Austin, Texas.

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an engineers dream

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