Robert W. B. Elliott


The Right Reverend Robert Woodward Barnwell Elliott was the first Missionary Bishop of what was then the Missionary District of Western Texas in the Episcopal Church. The Elliotts were an old Low Country family and members of "the Chivalry." His father, Stephen Elliott, was the Bishop of Georgia when the Civil War broke out, then served as the first and only Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America. Stephen Elliott was a founder of the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, and had founded the Montpelier Female Institute in Georgia in the 1840s. Robert Elliott was the founder of St. Mary's Hall in San Antonio, Texas, an institution once closely affiliated with the Episcopal Church. The Bishop Elliott Society in the Diocese of West Texas is named in his honor. The eminent Southern novelist Sarah Barnwell Elliott was a sister.