Paul Matthews, 1866-1954

Paul Matthews was born in Ohio in 1866, the son of Thomas Stanley Matthews (1824-1889), U.S. Senator from Ohio and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

He was consecrated Episcopal Bishop of New Jersey from 1915 to 1937, the 5th Bishop of New Jersey. He made his home for forty-two years ar Merwick at 79 Bayard Lane. The private home contained a small chapel or "oratory" built by Paul Matthews and a small third-floor theater space. In the library on Merwick's first floor, there is a plaque commemorating Elsie Procter Matthews, "who lived and died in this house." In 1957 Merwick became the long-term care and rehabilitation unit of the Medical Center at Princeton.

He married Elsie Procter whose grandfather founded Procter and Gamble Company. Both the Matthews and the Gamble families were greatly interested in the missionary work of the Episcopal Church, and the endowment Trinity College of Quezon City, in the Phillipines, was launched by 160 shares of Procter and Gamble stock given by the Matthews family in 1922. His son was managing editor of Time Magazine from 1942 to 1949. He was also Chaplain General of the Community of the Transfiguration, a home started in 1897 by his sister Eva Matthews, later known as Mother Eva Mary. This school originally designed as a fesh-air camp for underprivileged was known as beginnings became what is now the Bethany School in Cinncinati, Ohio.

Another school that Paul Matthews was instrumental in starting was the Princeton Nursery School, founded in 1930 by his daughter, Margaret Matthews Flinsch. Ms. Matthews Flinsch graduated from Vassar College and when she returned to Princeton, recognized the need for a preschool program serving John-Witherspoon neighborhood children whose parents had to work.

The tale is told in Chatsworth in the Pine Barrens, that “[w]hen Bishop Matthews, who had worn only a cassock on previous visits to the Pines, came down to confirm a class of backwoods children, they saw him in pontifical vestments for the first time and fled into the scrub, out of sight. Confirmation had to be set at a later date. No word of persuasion from the late Father Twing, missionary of the pines, who had prepared them, would induce them to come back to the little chapel.”

“More Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey”, by Henry Charlton Beck, 1937

He wrote two memiors, "Letters To My Grandchildren" and “Dear Ellen: Being Some Letters from Her Grandfather “(Winter Park, FL, Privately Printed, 1949.)