St. Paul's was founded on Christmas Day of 1849, in South Brooklyn, then the quickly developing southward expansion of old Brooklyn Heights. New homes and businesses were covering old countryside, farmland, and shoreline; industrialization was bringing a new way of life to the City of Brooklyn, waves of immigrants from the nations of the world were arriving and the American Civil War was looming. This was also the era when the Anglican Communion of Churches was experiencing a renewed vision of their catholic faith and order often called the "Anglo-Catholic Revival" of the Oxford Movement. Saint Paul's was formed in heady days of philosophical, social, economic, and religious change.[3]