CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY x BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE ersity Libra 5205.E53 iin EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES ASG521% COPYRIGHT, 1914 BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian TO HER WITH WHOM, IN MY MIND, ALL CHURCHES ARE ASSOCIATED LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix 28 ~ 48 The Meeting House, Ware, Mass.. . . . . Frontispiece FACING PAGE - St. Luke’s Church, Smithfield, Va. . b> 20 Interior, St. Luke’s Church, Smithfield, Va. 21 The “Old Ship” Meeting House, Hingham, Mass Interior, “Old Ship” Meeting House, Hingham, Mass. . 29 ~ “Gloria Dei,” Old ’ Old Swedes’ C Church, Philadelphia, Pa. : 32 Interior, “Gloria Dei,” Old Swedes’ Church, pepe Pa. 33 Old Swedes’ Church, Wilmington, Del. , 36 Interior, Old Swedes’ Church, Wilmington, Del. 37 St. Peter’s Church, New Kent County, ‘Va. ‘ 44 Interior, St. Peter’s Church, New Kent County, Va. 45 Old North Church, Boston, Mass. . Interior, Old North Church, Boston, Mais, 49 Trinity Church, Newport, R. L. —_— 52 Interior, Trinity Church, Newport, R. I. . 53 Old South Church, Boston, Mass. 54 Interior, Old South Church, Boston, Mase. 55 - King’s Chapel, Boston, Mass. j 58 © Interior, King’s Chapel, Boston, Mass. 59 First Church, Dedham, Mass. ‘ 60 Spires of Old North or Christ Church, Boston, Mass. 61 Spires of First_Baptist Church, Providence, R. I. 61 The Meeting House, Farmington, Conn. . s 64 Interior, The Meeting House, Farmington, Conn. 65 The First Baptist Church, Providence, R. I. 68 x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE Interior, The First Baptist Church, Providence, R.I. . 69 Bruton Parish Church, Williamsburg, Va. 70 Interior, Bruton Parish Church, Williamsburg, Va. 71 St. Paul’s Church, Edenton, N. C. wf 72 Interior, St. Paul’s Church, Edenton, N. C. 73 St. Michael’s Church, Charleston,S.C.. . . 74 Interior, St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, S. C. 5 Christ Church, Alexandria, Va. ; 76 Interior, Christ Church, Alexandria, Va. 77 Pohick Church, near Alexandria, Va. 78 Interior, Pohick Church, near Alexandria, Va. . 79 The Home Moravian Church, Winston-Salem, N. C. 80 Interior, The Home Moravian Church, Winston-Salem, N. C. 81 The First Reformed Church, Hackensack, N. J. . ; 84 Interior, The First Reformed Church, Hackensack, N. J. 85 Christ Church, Philadelphia, Pa. ‘ 86 Interior, Christ Church, Philadelphia, Pa. 87 Tennent Church, near Freehold, N. J.. 88 Interior, Tennent Church, near Freehold, N. J. . 89 St. Paul’s Chapel, New York City ; 90 Interior, St. Paul’s Chapel, New York City . 91 St. Peter’s Church, Philadelphia, Pa. 92 Interior, St. Peter’s Church, Philadelphia, Pa, 93 “Holy Trinity,” Lancaster, Pa. . ‘ 96 Interior of the Church of the “Holy Trinity,” ance Pa. 97 St. Paul’s Church, East Chester, N. Y. . . . 98 The First Presbyterian Church, Newark, N. J. . 99 Interior, First Presbyterian Church, Newark, N. J. . 100 Meeting House, Springfield, N. J. . 101 Interior, Meeting House, Springfield, N. J. 102 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi FACING PAGE St. Mark’s Church, New York City 103 Interior, St. Mark’s Church, New York City 108 First Church of Christ, Hartford, Conn. . : 109 Interior, First Church of Christ, Hartford, Conn. 112 Center Church, New Haven, Conn. 118 Interior, Center Church, New Haven, Conn. 114 The North Church, New Haven, Conn. : 115 Interior, The North Church, New Haven, Conn. 116 The First Congregational Church, Lyme, Conn. 117 The East Avon Congregational Church : 118 Interior, The East Avon Congregational Church. 119 First Congregational Church, Guilford, Conn. ; 120 Interior, First Congregational Church, Guilford, can ; 121 The First Congregational Church, Bennington, Vt. . 122 Interior, The First Congregational Church, Bennington, Vt. 123 Interior, The Beneficent Congregational Church, Providence, Reds 4. 4 124 Meeting House Hall, Thee oe 125 St. John’s Church, Portsmouth, N. H. . 126 Interior, St. John’s Church, Portsmouth, N. H. 127 The Park Street Church, Boston, Mass. 128 Interior, The Park Street Church, Boston, Mass. . 129 The Old Meeting House, Lancaster,Mass. 3 132 Interior, The Old Meeting House, Lancaster, Mass. 133 The First Church, Lenox, Mass. . 136 Interior, The First Church, Lenox, Mass. 137 The First Church, Springfield, Mass. : 140 Interior, The First Church, Springfield, Mass. . 141 The Meeting House, Deerfield, Mass. 142 Interior, The Meeting House, Deerfield, Masa, 143 xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ; FACING PAGE The Independent Presbyterian Church, Savannah, Ga. + 144 Interior, The Independent Presbyterian Church, Savannah,Ga 145 The Monumental Church, Richmond, Va. ; 146 Interior, The Monumental Church, Richmond, Va. . 147 St. Paul’s Church, Augusta, Ga. ‘ 150 Interior, St. Paul’s Church, Augusta, Ga.. 151 St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, 8. C.. . . . 154 Interior, St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, S. C. . 155 The North Reformed Church, Schraalenburg, N. J. . . 160 Interior, The North Reformed Church, Schraalenburg, N. J. 161 Trinity Church, Newark, N. J. . . & . 162 Interior, Trinity Church, Newark, N. J. . es ace 163 St. John’s Chapel, Varick Street, New York City . 166 Interior, St. John’s Chapel, Varick Street, New York City 167 The First Reformed Church, New Brunswick, N. J. 170 Interior, The First Reformed Church, New Brunswick, N. J. 171 The Old Dutch Church, Tappan, N. J. ke 174 Interior, The Old Dutch Church, Tappan, N. J. 175 The First Presbyterian Church, Sag Harbor, N. Y. 176 Interior, The First Presbyterian Church, Sag Harbor, N. y. 177 INTRODUCTION Of the original church buildings in the American colonies there is none now standing, and but a few of even the second or third generations of structures are to-day remaining; but these first buildings were after all temporary, usually mere sheds, and we do still possess not a great proportion but a very considerable number of the buildings which the different congregations considered of definitive worthiness for the worship of God. The number of these has unfortunately dwindled; the perishable materials of which many of them were composed, the aspirations of unlettered congregations toward new-fashioned things, and the removal of population from its old centres have lost to us many of them, and while the recent deep and general interest in the things connected with the formative period in America will do much to arrest the general destruction of these buildings, it has seemed to the writer that while there was yet time, it was worth while to gather together into one volume photographs and brief histories of those that still survive, both because of the in- trinsic beauty of many of the buildings, and because they are the foci of so many interesting or glorious traditions. During the past five years the writer has made a very INTRODUCTION XV still standing in the United States, and the writer has thought that its unique character and its extremely interesting, if misdirected, architecture have made its illustration worth while. To the architect the principal interest in these old buildings is of course their forms, in which were expressed the supreme efforts of the artistic genius of our ancestors, the designers of the Colonial period, whether we call them architects, amateurs, or builders who were inheritors and practitioners of a concrete and perfected tradition such as does not even to-day exist. Their furniture, their dwellings, and their public buildings were all products of the same genius and the same ideal, and to-day we are seeking and finding in them sources of inspiration no less satisfactory than the best that Europe has to offer. Now while there were certain differences in the character- istics of the Colonial work of the several portions of the country, early American design was nevertheless homo- geneous, and while: the dwellings possessed most markedly the differences and distinctions obtaining in the various sections, the public buildings, and especially the churches, ap- proached most nearly a uniform ideal, and it is a rather inter- esting fact that the change in design from 1638 to 1830 (which is approximately the period covered in this book) is far less noticeable than that in the twenty-five years succeeding the latter date. Nor do we find ecclesiastical design in New Eng- EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES THE MEETING HOUSE, WARE, MASS. EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES CHAPTER I CHURCH ORGANIZATION IN THE COLONIES HE Eastern seaboard of North America was colonized primarily, for commercial reasons, through the agency of several chartered companies, two of them English, the others Dutch and Swedish. The colonists procured by the companies to effect the settlements were men actuated by two distinct reasons: the first, love of adventure; and the second, a desire for religious freedom; and these reasons must have been very potent indeed in the minds of these early adventurers to induce them to leave the comfortable civilization of Europe for the discomforts and dangers of the new country. Nor were the difficulties which beset them unknown or underestimated; there is no place in the world to-day where our imaginations could conjure up for us dangers so horrible or privations so severe as those which the colonists did not fear to meet. Their ships were small and frail, to them the ocean was peopled with horrible mon- sters, and the new land inhabited by monstrous and ferocious savages; but with a firmness of mind almost beyond our conception, adventurous soldier and religious mechanic ad- 8 4 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES vanced undaunted to meet these perils, and if the imaginary terrors were never experienced, the slow and horrible tortures of hunger and disease which actually beset them were not less to be feared than those which they had expected to find. The eastern shore of the United States offered no easy road to wealth; from Virginia to Massachusetts it is a land of cold winters and fiercely hot summers; no such temperate climate as that of England exists along the coast. Of mineral wealth there was little; the Indians had few possessions which made their conquest worth while; in trade, furs were the only commodity which did not have to be sown and grown. Nor was it a land peculiarly suited to agriculture; as in every new country, it was a series of forests and of swamps, and we who live now have no experience by which we can measure the hardships endured by the early settlers. In Virginia sixty survived the first winter, more than forty perished; of the Plymouth colony forty-four died out of one hundred and two; but with a persistence unequaled in the annals of colonization, settlers continued to come, and with such rapidity that in New England twenty thousand were added to the population during the twenty years after the first settlement at Plymouth Rock. In the calm fortitude with which they endured their suffer- ings, the religious were not one whit behind the adventurous, and the pious fanaticism of New England surpassed by very little, if at all, the impressive reliance upon their God which EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 5 marked the Virginia adventurer. Each uttered his enthu- siasm with the same fervor, and each harried the infidel Indian and the dissenting Christian with the same pious ferocity. As each little community was established, whether in New England, or in Virginia, or in New York, or in the Swedish settlements along the Delaware, almost its first act was to provide for a form of worship, and sometimes, even before houses could be constructed to shelter the colonists, a rude church building was erected. There were strangely strong resemblances between the beliefs, the forms, and the systems of government of the various Colonial churches. We are accustomed to contrast the Puritan of New England with the Cavalier of Virginia, and to assume that the one was simple and plain, while the other was aristocratic and ostentatious. Whence this tra- dition arose, the writer is at a loss to know; the settlers in Virginia and in New England both had at their heads men of birth, breeding, and station in England, but the mass of the population were, in the beginning at least, good, hard- working, robust citizens, whose value was measured, not by their blood, but by the works of their hands. So little was the display in aristocratic Virginia that in 1639 the first brick house at Jamestown, measuring sixteen by twenty- four feet, was spoken of as “the fairest ever known in this country, for substance and uniformity”; this was thirty-two 6 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES years after the first settlement, and it may well be doubted / that “simple” New England did not possess, so long after its founding, far finer houses than this. The distinctions between the Puritan sect of New England and the Episcopal sect of Virginia are hardly visible to the modern mind accustomed to disregard non-essential differ- ences; they were doubtless all-important then, but now seem trifling and insignificant, and a brief survey of these two, and of the other sects which settled this country, will not enable us to comprehend very fully the grounds of the fierce religious hatred which distorted the minds of all our early colonists. We have rather set up the Puritans as the ideal of American citizenship: men willing to lose all to worship God; stern, ex- cusably self-righteous, men whose intolerances toward their fellowmen we are inclined to look upon with a kindly leniency. As a matter of fact, Puritan, Cavalier, Dutchman, and Lutheran were tarred with the same brush, imbued with the same deep and narrow fanatic spirit, incapable of per- ceiving any other viewpoint than their own, and absolutely unwilling to even associate with those who deviated even a hair’s breadth therefrom. Any one who has made even a cursory examination of the early history of religion in America will find very little on which he can look with much pleasure. There were but two colonies in which religious toleration of any kind was EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 7 practised, and these were curiously enough the Catholic colony of Maryland and the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, and while New England perforce permitted the services of the Church of England, and Virginia allowed at times the Puritans to meet openly, both alike persecuted and destroyed the Catholic and the Quaker. The first church which established a foothold in America was the Church of England; on Sunday morning, the 26th of April in 1607, the expedition sent out by the Virginia Council of London (otherwise known as the London Company) entered Chesapeake Bay and landed on the southern shore, set up a cross at the place of landing and called it Cape Henry. Two weeks later they decided on an island near the north bank of the James River, forty miles from its mouth, as a place of permanent settlement. They then built a fort, and in the centre of the fort their church. This, the first English church in America, Captain John Smith described as follows: *“When we first went to Virginia, I well remember we did hang an awneing (which is an old saile) to three or four trees, to shadow us from the sunne; our walles were rales of wood; our seats unhewed trees till we cut plankes; our Pulpit a bar of wood nailed to two neighbouring trees. In foule weather we shifted into an old rotten tent; for we had few better, and this came by way of adventure for new. “This was our church till we built a homely thing like a barne, set upon cratchets, covered with rafts, sedge, and 8 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES earth; so was the walls. The best of houses (were) of like curiosity; but the most part far much worse workmanship, that neither could well defend (from) wind nor rains. Yet we had daily Common Prayer, morning and evening; every Sunday two sermons, and every three months the Holy Com- munion, till our minister died; but our prayers daily with an Homily on Sundaies we continued two or three years after, till our preachers came.” From its beginning the Virginia church was an integral part of the Church of England, technically under the juris- diction of the diocese of the Bishop of London, who had authority to select and send clergy to Virginia. The support of the church up to the time of the Revolutionary War was by general taxation, being from thirty to sixty pounds of to- bacco per annum for each adult male, but because of the distance which separated the colony from its theoretical head, and because of the new conditions under which the church was compelled to work, certain new rules and laws were perforce necessary, and since there was no bishop of the Virginia church to make these laws, they were made as lay laws by the House of Burgesses. Probably the system of church government adopted by any community is influential on the character of the people, and on the buildings which are the concrete expression of the creed of the church itself, and we find that while in theory the Virginia colony was part of the diocese of the Bishop of London, practically it was self- EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 9 governing, and we must not expect the buildings to be of home design. The clergy was selected by the bishop, and the poor average quality of many of the clergy of the Virginia colony after its first few years of life was due to this fact, since the parishes themselves were unable to select precisely the man they needed, but had to depend upon England. Episcopal ministers were in few cases men born in the colony and sent to England for or- dination; in most cases they were sent directly to the parish, but not infrequently English clergymen in bad repute at home came to the colonies to seek a new field, without having been sent at all, and were welcomed because of the dearth of clergymen of any sort. There are even reported to be cases where men who had never been ordained imposed themselves on the colonists as clergymen. The parishes, however, were able to exercise a certain amount of control over their clergy, either by refusing to induct unsuitable men, or by returning them to England and asking for others; but this process was tedious and slow, and not infrequently the change was for the worse. The support of the church, to pay the clergy, to construct new buildings, and to repair existing ones, was raised primarily by direct taxation of all the colonists, whether these were members of the Church of England or Dissenters; and since there was neither any bishop nor any responsible church government in Virginia, the House of Burgesses made such 10 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES supplemental laws as were necessary, and the vestry decided all minor questions. This single government of two institu- tions, church and state, is hardly comprehensible in our day, but the church was so intimately a part of the daily life of the people that offences against the church became offences against the people as a whole, and because the church was an established church, any offence against it became more or less political, and no attempt was made by the Assembly or House of Bur- gesses to discriminate between clerical and lay crimes. Ab- sence from church and theft were both criminal offences, and were proceeded against in precisely the same manner. Thus the church government was in a sense democratic, but as the Reverend Joseph Dunbar has wisely said, “It was the democracy of Athens and not that of Rome,” because as each parish included a great deal of territory, the general mem- bership delegated their authority at an early date into the hands of a self-perpetuating vestry, which naturally became more or less aristocratic in character. In the course of time, as wealth increased and became concentrated in Virginia, worship in the established church became less and less possible to impose on all the inhabitants, not only because of diver- gences of faith, but because the church buildings themselves had the best pews reserved for magistrates and their families, and private galleries erected at their own cost by rich men of the parish, giving an aristocratic status to the buildings much disliked by the middle class, and about 1740 permission EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 11 was given dissenters from the established church to apply in court for a license to worship according to their own con- sciences, and while tithes for the support of the church were still compulsory, tithes paid by dissenters belonging to a licensed church were paid to the support of this church. At the time of the Revolutionary War, the church volun- tarily dis-established itself, becoming the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States, and its method of govern- ment from that time is familiar. Church government had been so completely localized that the one difficulty in the orderly course of its progress was that for many years bishops of the Church of England refused to ordain bishops in the United States, so that the Protestant Episcopal Church finally resorted to the bishops of the Church of Scotland to continue their line. The second English settlement was made at Plymouth by the so-called Pilgrim Fathers, and the exact amount of dif- ference as to belief and methods of church government be- tween them and the Virginians is not very easy to define. English Puritans had as their ministers, in probably the vast majority of cases, clergymen ordained by the Church of Eng- land, but who believed, with their congregations, that certain reforms within the church were necessary; these reforms were apparently chiefly as to the form of worship rather than as to the doctrines; their belief in the English church was com- plete enough so that William Brewster, an elder who acted 12 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES practically as their pastor for ten years, did not administer the sacraments, and they regarded the Reverend Mr. Robin- son, an English clergyman who had emigrated to Leyden in Holland, as their real clergyman. When the Pilgrims desired to immigrate to this country, they secured permission from the Virginia Company, just as had the emigrants to Virginia, and to secure permission they stated to the Crown in 1617 their position regarding the Church of England, declared their willingness to admit the authority of the King over the bishops, and even the authority of the bishops over the church as representatives of the King, al- though not as spiritual authorities. One of their first acts on landing at Plymouth was to erect a meeting house, which was on a hill near the harbor, and was a large square building with a flat roof on which were mounted six cannon. The Pilgrims, however, constituted only a very small proportion of the New England Puritans, and were the only body who almost from the first advocated separation from the Church of England; the later immigrants desired to stay in the church, but to do away with certain of its forms and ceremonies, to reduce the power of the bishops, and to expel from the church people of “ungodly ”’ life. The first colonists were under the auspices of the Virginia Company, but the King finally granted a charter to the Plymouth (England) Company to colonize Massachusetts and the adjoining territories, and to govern the same, prac- EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 13 tically delegating his authority to the governor and council of the Plymouth Company. When these officers decided to emigrate to New England, the colony became practically self- governing and semi-independent, the principal distinction between New England and Virginia arising from the fact that the Virginia colony was governed from England, while New England was governed from within its own borders. There was apparently at first no intention on the part of the Puritans to set up a separate church; Francis Hig- ginson, one of the first two ministers who came to New Eng- land, said on leaving England, “‘ We do not go to New England as separators from the Church of England, though we cannot but separate from the corruption in it,”’ but it was not very long before the New England church became, in fact if not in name, independent of the Church of England. We find that as early as 1629, when the church at Salem desired to choose a minister and a teacher, the Reverend Mr. Skelton and the Reverend Mr. Higginson, both ordained ministers in the Church of England, presented themselves for the posi- tions, and were requested to name the qualifications desirable in a minister; both of them stated that two things were re- quired, a sense of fitness, and an election by the male members of “a company of beleevers joyned together in covenante”’; this latter qualification being of course totally repugnant to the doctrines of the Church of England. The Reverend Mr. Skelton was elected, and was recon- 14 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES secrated by the laying on of hands by the Reverend Mr. Hig- ginson and “three or four grave members of the congregation.” Thereafter the Reverend Mr. Higginson was ordained as a teacher in the same manner. Now while it continued for some time to be customary to choose ministers who had been pre- viously ordained by the Church of England, some similar cere- mony of reordination by the congregation, assisted by ministers of neighboring parishes, was gone through with; until finally the present Congregational Church method of ordination by other ordained ministers was substituted for it. In this gradual manner the present Congregational Church was established. We have always been accustomed to regard the church in Virginia as being a state church, and the New England church as a free church; in fact the church in New England was quite as much a state church as the Church of England in Virginia, or even the Catholic Church in Italy; it would be impossible to imagine a church which was more completely a state church than that established in the early New England colonies. The church was the state, and the state was the church. Fora long time even the governing bodies of the two were identical, possibly because the early Puritans regarded the Bible as a sort of working handbook of laws, and just as the Jewish law was written in Deuteronomy, so the law of the Puritans was written in the Bible, and the acts of the governing body were mainly declarations of the penalties attached to failure to comply with these laws. EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 15 In order to be a burgess with the right to vote, one had to belong to one of the churches established by law in New England, but the churches elected new members as if they were modern clubs, rejecting those unfit for Christian fellow- ship (and it was astonishing how little made a man unfit), but the fact that a man was not permitted to join a church and therefore could not vote did not mean either that he was free from taxation or that he did not have to go to church. Oh, no, indeed! He had to attend just as faithfully as any church member and behave with the same decorum, or else be whipped and fined. He had to pay his taxes for the support of that church, too, and if he so much as dared to insinuate that the minister might be improved upon in any respect, he was whipped or fined again. ‘No taxation without representa- tion” was not the rallying word of early New England, any more than mercy and justice were things to be actually used, and not merely delightful subjects for discussion. New churches in New England were self-organized; and any group of men settling in a definite territory who were neigh- bors, and who “were satisfied of one another’s honest faith ’ and repentance,” might enter into a covenant (or written agreement) to organize and carry on a church. The number of men who could thus organize was not fixed by legal status: in one case as few as four men entered into a covenant, while seven or eight was a not uncommon number. However, no new church could be recognized as part of the ecclesiastical -_ 16 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES system until the character of its members had been approved by the magistrates and the elders of the existing churches. By this means the original churches were able to continue their polity (whether civil or religious) without danger of its altera- tion by people who did not agree with the existing order of things. The covenants were in most cases of very broad character, brief and of simple terminology, so that even those churches which have changed their doctrines during the course of their development are still operating under the orig- inal covenants. it | The system of universal taxation was satisfactory enough, as long as the church was enabled to either transport to England or banish to the wilderness people who disagreed with it, but as other faiths set up their churches and were tolerated, the hardship of contributing to the support of two churches became too great to be borne, and in 1727 exemption from taxation was granted to the Episcopalians, who had the support of the Crown behind them, and in 1728-1729 the Bap- tists and the Quakers were also exempted. The system of uni- versal taxation for church support, while actually followed in all New England colonies, was not the theoretical method of some of the settlements; in New Haven, for example, people were requested to contribute voluntarily; since there were very heavy penalties against those who did not so contribute in proper proportion to their means, it was a distinction without a difference, and even this shadow of voluntary support was EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 17 in time withdrawn, so that in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and the territories governed by Massachusetts¢ the State Church was universal, and was only dis-established, in Con- necticut in 1818, and in Massachusetts in 1834. The New England congregations, continued at first as part of the Church of England, gradually became more and more completely separated from it, both because the Church of England refused to recognize the informal ordination of their ministers, and because the congregations themselves declined to countenance the authority of the bishops. These congregations felt the need of some superior body, and grad- ually a good part of the authority originally held by the governor and council of the company fell into the hands of a synod, or convention, composed of the elders and minis- ters of the different churches. At first the governor and council were members of this synod, although not ex officio; but certain governors, notably Sir Henry Vane, being found at issue with the synod in points of doctrine, this custom was discontinued, and the synod acted independently, although its resolutions had for many years the effect of law, since they were immediately ratified and put into effect by the government of the colonies. These congregations and their synod, or convention, formed what we to-day know as the Congregational Church. Before considering the other colonists there are two other sects which must be considered, both outgrowths of the Puri- 18 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES tan Church: the Unitarian and the Baptist. Unitarianism was a belief rather than a movement, and, as it gained strength among members of the churches, their independent govern- ing bodies automatically transformed them into Unitarian churches. Such was the case with the First Church of Ply- mouth, founded 1620; the First Church of Salem, founded in 1630, and the First Church of Boston, founded in 1640; so that while all these exist under their original covenant, they are now Unitarian. Curiously enough, however, the first church to openly declare itself Unitarian was not one of the cove- nanting churches, but the Episcopal Church housed in Kings Chapel in Boston; the proprietors of this church in 1785, by a vote of twenty to seven, declared themselves Unitarian, al- though as late as the year 1800 all the covenanting churches were still on the fence. The Unitarian Church has been spoken of here because the congregations formed by the original Puritans or Covenanters have been split up between the Congregational and Unitarian churches, and in these two faiths they continue to exist to-day. The first dissenters from the ranks of the Dissenters were not, however, the Unitarians, but the Baptists, led to some extent at least by Roger Williams. Roger Williams appears to have been a Puritan clergyman of the Church of England, who had come to the colonies at a very early date, and was not allowed to preach or belong to the recognized churches because he believed in complete separation from the Church EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 19 of England. The tales of his difficulties with the Puritans are too long, too cruel, and too ridiculous to enter into here; he was finally banished into the wilderness, and, after spending a hard winter with the Indians, retired into what is now Rhode Island, where he gathered together a band of dis-. satisfied spirits, many of whom had also been banished from Massachusetts, and there the Baptist Church was founded. The Reverend Mr. Williams, however, was apparently one of those restless seekers after truth who can never be satisfied with anything, for he finally dissented from the Baptists, and died the only member of a church of his own. The doctrine which he was instrumental in promulgating or promoting gained considerable acceptance, not only in Massachusetts, but throughout the United States, and Baptist congregations were gradually formed. One other of the very early sects should be mentioned here: the Quakers. It seems to the writer that there has been a great deal of sympathy wasted on the virtuous, harmless (and offensive) members of the sect that caused so much trouble to the early colonists. They were persecuted both in New England and in Virginia during the early days of the colonies; in Virginia they were told to go away and not come back under penalty of banishment or other legal procedure; but, delighted with the opportunity offered to make martyrs of themselves, they declined to go, or after being banished re- turned; a few of them were fined and imprisoned. 20 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES In Massachusetts similar action was taken, and when, after they had been banished, fined, imprisoned, and whipped, they still continued their activities, the Puritans lost patience, | and four of them in three years were executed. The revulsion of feeling, both in New England and Virginia, which followed these severities resulted in toleration of the Quakers, and the consequent termination of their nuisances. It may be presumed with some show of reason that had the Quakers been content to abide by the recognized (and possibly requisite) laws of the colonies into which they entered, undesired and unwelecomed, they would not have been dis- turbed. Neither the Puritans nor the Episcopalians of Vir- ginia seem to have punished men for holding opinions con- trary to those generally accepted, but the Quakers were not content with such silent opposition; they entered the churches in both colonies during services, denounced the faiths of those churches, argued with the clergy, declined to comply with the laws regarding church support, church attendance, etc., and in general made themselves as objectionable nuisances as people of that day could imagine, and while in the light of the present we must deplore the existence of the laws which they broke, and the punishments which were inflicted on them for violation of these laws, we must confess that the aggravating attitude of men who said, “We are defenceless and weak, and won’t hit back; come and slap us if you dare, you big cowardly bullies,” would be almost too much for our ST. LUKE’S CHURCH, SMITHFIELD, VA. “VA ‘CISIAHLINS ‘HOYNHO S$, auHNT ‘Ls SMOIMaLNI EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 21 toleration, and certainly proved too much for the extremely hot-tempered and fanatic colonists. One of the most powerful of the present-day churches and one which has remaining a not inconsiderable number of its early structures is the Presbyterian, but the Presbyterians were not among the pioneers, and their early history in Amer- ica does not present much of interest to any one except the student of ecclesiastical history. Some of the early Congre- gational churches in Massachusetts were suspected of a leaning toward Presbyterianism, but the oldest official Presbyterian churches were founded by Scotch immigrants who brought with them their ministers and their faith. The Presbyterians were representatives of the established Church of Scotland, which at the time of the early settlement of the United States was occupying an anomalous position. It was a church which acknowledged the authority of no bishops, yet still had bishops as part of its organization, and even before the coming of this sect to America the Presbyterians had been able to enfranchise themselves, ordain their own ministers, and by congregations or by presbyteries to dominate their own affairs. There was no particular break in the policy of the church, and from the beginning, semi-independent of the home church, it eventually became completely independent. The position of the Lutherans was not very different: there was no single dominant governing body of the Lutheran Church, and the Lutherans who immigrated to this country 22 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES were not only Germans, but Dutch and Swedish, and while Lutheranism was in Sweden the State Church, and was ac- knowledged as the parent body by the Swedish settlers along. the Delaware River, the ministers being sent from Sweden, the German and Dutch Lutherans had to take care of themselves; and eventually the separate nationalities became part of the general independent organization. The Dutch Reformed and German Reformed churches were governed from the central authority at Amsterdam. The early settlers around New York were principally members of the Dutch Reformed Church, becoming independent of the home body when New Amsterdam was captured by the Eng- lish and renamed New York. The Dutch Reformed and Lu- theran churches were probably the most tolerant of the officially recognized sects, the Lutheran perhaps because they came on sufferance, and the Dutch Reformed because they had nobody to persecute, if we except a few of the Lutheran faith in New York City; even these were not heavily penalized for their religion, although they did not escape scot free. The Quakers in Pennsylvania and the Catholics in Mary- land were the only other sects present during the formative period of the colonies, and curiously enough these two ex- tremes of the Christian religion were the only two which did not arrogate to themselves the sole right to dictate worship in their own neighborhoods. In both cases their admission to the colonies at all was completely on sufferance, so perhaps EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 23 too much credit should not be given to them for their apparent ‘benevolence. The attitude of the Catholic Church to-day toward those of different faith is in marked contrast to what it once was, and the Quakers, with all the good qualities for which they have been so deservedly commended, have only within the past few generations exhibited much evidence of believing that anybody but a Quaker could get to heaven. The above summary of the facts concerning the history of the organizations of the early American churches will give sufficient understanding of the methods of government in the colonies, so that the rise and growth of the various sects can be traced through their buildings with some degree of understanding. The beginnings of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Virginia and of the Congregational Church in New England have been dealt with with some particularity because they were the two most influential factors in the development of American church architecture, and also, while they are most fully covered in American history, the histories themselves convey (without misstating facts) a false impression of a state of conscience and affairs in these early days. In looking over the illustrations of this volume one will find that a plurality of the buildings illustrated were constructed by the descendants of the New England settlers, and by far the larger part of the remaining ones were built by the Epis- copal Church. Of old Baptist churches we have but a few; four or five of the Lutheran and Dutch Reformed churches, 24 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES several Presbyterian, but not one example remaining from the days of the Catholic settlement; Methodism only began in this country in 1760. We will also find by comparison of the il- lustrations that the denomination had less influence in the design and construction of the buildings than did the local traditions connected with the part of the country in which they were erected, and we will therefore in this volume take up the buildings somewhat in chronological order and somewhat according to their geographic distribution. CHAPTER II CHURCHES OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ()' the church edifices completed during the seven- teenth century there are but four remaining which we know certainly to have been completed prior to 1700: St. Luke’s, near Smithfield, in Isle of Wight County, Virginia; the Ship Meeting House at Hingham, Massachusetts; ‘‘ Gloria Dei”? at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Trinity or Old Swede’s at Wilmington, Delaware. One other church was probably begun in 1700 and will be considered in this chapter, not only because chronologically a wide gap separates it from the eighteenth century churches, but also because architecturally it approaches the churches of the seventeenth century more nearly than the later ones; this is St. Peter’s, New Kent County, Virginia. Two others were perhaps built during the century: the Quaker Meeting House at Flushing, and the Dutch Reformed Church at Oakland, New Jersey, both small, uninteresting build- ings. There is still one other building which might possibly be classified as a seventeenth century church, the ruins of the old church erected at Jamestown and destroyed in the fire which swept the town, and recently reconstructed; the ruined tower of this church is the one which is familiar from the wood cuts in the school histories, but as the restoration of the church was 25 26 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES. largely conjectural, and as the church building was not in ex- istence during one hundred and fifty years, further discussion of it seems to be unnecessary. St. Luke’s near Smithfield, built in 1632, is the oldest building of English construction in the United States, antedating the ruined church at Jamestown by forty-five years, and when one realizes that the first settlement at Jamestown was made only twenty-five years before the erection of this building, its size and dignified character are surprising. In spite of its age it has not about it the historical associations that many of the more recent churches possess; it seems to have been the chureh of a parish situated in a quiet backwater of the Virginia col- ony, and none of the men whose names are familiar to us from the prominent parts they played either during the Colonial period or during the Revolution was closely associated with it; but even aside from the fact that it is the earliest remaining church of English construction its architectural interest is sufficiently great to make it far better known than it appears to be. It was constructed by one Joseph Bridger, who prob- ably made what drawings were necessary, besides acting as the superintendent; we know little about him, except that his son was General Joseph Bridger, a councillor of state in Virginia to King Charles II, and a man of much importance in the colony. For over two hundred years it was used continually as a place of worship, but in 1836 it was abandoned and gradually EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES Q7 became more and more dilapidated, until in 1884 the roof fell and brought down with it a portion of the eastern wall. At that time the Reverend David Barr, the clergyman of a neigh- boring church, realized the importance of the old structure to American history, and was instrumental in collecting money enough to repair it and put it in thoroughly good order; there was very little of the old interior woodwork, and none of the old glass left, but from what remained Mr. E. J. N. Stent, the architect who conducted the restoration, and who, by the way, worked gratuituously and even collected money to help during the restoration, succeeded in working out the present interior as nearly as could be determined along the original lines. Fortunately the brickwork was intact with the excep- tion of the part of the eastern wall before spoken of, and he cannot have gone far wrong either in the exterior or in the in- terior. When the restoration was made twelve memorial win- dows were placed in the church, and it may be interesting to note the names of those to whom the windows were dedi- cated: George Washington, Robert E. Lee, Joseph Bridger, the architect; William Hubbard, the first rector of the church; Sir Walter Raleigh, Captain John Smith, John Rolfe, Reverend Dr. Blair, founder of the College of William and Mary, and Bishops Madison, Meade, Moore, and Johns, and the choice of these twelve names is interesting because we find the archi- tect honored with the clergy of the church and with the famous men of the colony. 28 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES Architecturally the building is an extremely picturesque brick church, reminiscent not of the Renaissance work then becoming dominant in England, but of the older Gothic; it is not at all unlike many of the small English parish churches of the sixteenth century when the Gothic style was really ex- tinct, although its superficial characteristics, the buttress and the pointed arch, still obtained. The stepped gable at the chan- cel end of the church is an unusual feature in English church architecture, but in the restoration of the church at James- town the same type of gable was followed. The tower is the only part of the building which shows the Renaissance influ- ence, and this only in the detail of the tower, where coigns were used for strengthening the angles instead of buttresses, and a sort of pediment was applied above the main entrance door. The mullions were constructed of brick, and the chancel win- dow is very interesting, oie of its really excellent quality of design, but also because it employs both circular and pointed windows in an unusual and agreeable way. It is rather surprising to find a building of this distinctly rural type, since the immigrants: into Virginia have been commonly supposed to be city folk, and one would have expected them to transport with them the style of architecture then fashionable; but as before said, the only portion of the building which even suggests Renaissance work is the tower. / The building was of no great size—few of the Virginia i churches were—but the excellence of its proportions, and the THE “OLD SHIP” MEETING HOUSE, HINGHAM, MASSACHUSETTS “SSVI. ‘WVHONIH ‘ASNOH ONILAAW dIHS d1IO UOMMALNI = weed ererete SP ES poe rotor me (Bie j| rg iver EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 29 rather unusual interest in every portion of its design, would single it out for consideration even were it not remarkable for its antiquity. The older churches in Virginia are not, on the whole, a very interesting lot of structures; the country is even to-day sparsely settled, and in the Colonial period, owing to the system of colonization employed, the population was still more scattered, so that during those times churches were in- frequently less than ten miles apart, and were located not at any little settlement, but in approximately the centres of the parishes which they served. There was no collection of wealth at any one point, and even the later Virginia churches, except those in the cities, were neither very large nor very finely executed, so that while some of the most interesting Colonial domestic architecture in the country is along the James River, the churches are, as a class, of historic rather than of archi- tectural importance. The larger landowners not infrequently constructed chapels on their own estates because of the diffi- culties attending a five-mile ride over the frightfully muddy Virginia roads, and thus the interest of the wealthiest portion of the parishes was diverted from what one would be expected to be the natural ends. Such churches as St. Paul’s at Norfolk, Virginia, which was built in what was then a small town, were far above the average of the Virginia church structures. St. Paul’s has a very interesting history, and its records have been carefully pre- 30 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES served, so we can learn something of the way in which the colonists went about their church building and administration during the seventeenth century. The present building was the second constructed on the same site, and was built in 1759; but very full information is at hand about its predeces- sor, built in 1638, and it is worth while transcribing for the light it sheds on that early day. At the time of the construc- tion of the first St. Paul’s there were already two churches in Norfolk County, but the settlement at Elizabeth River (now Norfolk) had so largely increased that its inhabitants, strongly disinclined to travel eight miles to the nearest church (as under the laws they were compelled to do), desired a church for themselves, and procured from the governor and council an order for its institution. This order has been lost, but we learn from a letter, in part copied below, that construction was not carried on continuously, and that it was necessary to issue a new order for its completion: “At a Court holden in the Lower County of New Norfolke 21 of November 1638. “Capt. Adam Thorowgood, Esq., Capt. John Sibsey, Mr. Willie Julian, Mr. Edward Windha, Mr. Francis Mason, Mr. Henry Seawell. “Whereas there hath beene an order of Court granted by the Governor and Counsell for the Building and erecting of a Church in the upper — of this County with a reference EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 31 to the Commander and Commissioners of sd County for appointing of a place fitting and convenient for the situation and building thereof, the sd order being in part not accom- plish. But standing now in elsortion to be voyde and the work to fall into ruins. We now the sd. Commissioners taking it into consideration doe appoint Captain John Sibsey and Henry Seawell to procure workmen for the finishing of the same and what they shall agree for with the sd. workmen to be levied by the appointment of us the Commissioners.” This order is of interest as indicating how completely the ecclesiastical affairs of the colony were run by the civil gov- ernment. We find no mention in it of the members of the parish as having to do with the construction, nor is the rector apparently considered at all, a very different state of affairs from what nowadays obtains. A man named Lillie was the builder of the church, but work went along so slowly that it was not until 1641, either three or four years after its begin- ning, that it was completed, and the modern trouble between owners and contractors had its parallel in this case, where a certain Mr. Hayes, in complaining of the delay, spoke of the workmen as “a company of jackanapesses.” He was in- stantly sued for slander by the builder, who testified that his work could not go forward for want of “nayles” and other ironwork. The esteem in which our Colonial ancestors re- garded their churches is shown by another curious entry in 32 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES the records of St. Paul’s: a certain person was punished for scandalous conduct by being made to sit upon a stool at the end of the aisle for two successive Sundays, the punishment. apparently consisting of the substitution of the aisle for his pew, since the entire congregation suffered the penalty of going to church anyway. St. Peter’s in New Kent County, Virginia, is the only other existing Virginia church which dates from practically the seventeenth century, and is in general type not very dif- ferent from St. Luke’s at Smithfield, although it does not possess the interest of the older building, and is of more marked Renaissance characteristics. St. Peter’s parish, it is believed, was established with the forming of the New County of Kent, which was formed from the County of York in 1654. There are no extant records for the period between its foundation and the year 1684. The first reference in the vestry book to the present St. Peter’s Church is found in the minutes of the meeting held August 13, 1700: “Whereas, the Lower Church of this Parish is very much out of Repair and Standeth very incon- venient for most of the inhabitants of the said parish; There- fore ordered that as soon as conveniently may be a new Church of Brick Sixty feet long and twenty fower feet wide. in the clear and fourteen feet pitch with a Gallery Sixteen feet long be built and Erected upon the maine Roade by the School House near Thomas Jackson’s; and the Clerk is ’ OLD SWEDES’ CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA, PA. “GLORIA DEI,’ > INTERIOR, “‘GLORIA DEI,’ OLD SWEDES’ CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA, PA. EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 33 ordered to give a Copy of this order to Capt. Nicho Mere- wether who is Requested to show the same to Will Hughes and desire him to draw a Draft of said Church and to bee at the next vestry.” Work on the new church was begun in the spring of 1701, and in 1703 the work was so far advanced that services could be held in the building. This building remained unaltered for twenty years or more except for a brick wall built around the churchyard, “‘s’d wall to be in all Respects as well done as the Capitol wall in Williamsburgh.” In 1722 a belfry was erected at the west end of the church, and in the year 1740 we find that “the Minister and Vestry of this Parish have Agreed with Mr. Wm. Worthe, of the Parish of St. Paul in the County of Stafford, Builder, to Erect and Build a Steeple and Vestry Room according to a Plan Delivered into the Vestry drawn by the S’d Walter (?) for the Consideration of One Hundred & thirty Pounds at times to be paid.” Such minor alterations and repairs as have been made to the old church since 1740 have not changed its outward ap- pearance to any great extent. St. Peter’s looks to-day much as it did toward the middle of the eighteenth century with the added attractiveness produced by the mellowness of age. During the Civil War St. Peter’s was defaced by soldiers who used the building for a stable. The war did much to scatter the congregation; there were those left, however, who 34 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES set to work to renew and repair the damaged church, and the interior of St. Peter’s Church, as it appears to-day, deserves notice. The walls are plastered, marked off in blocks, and colored a soft gray. The benches are simple in design, and have been painted a sober brown. The illustration is some- what severe in its simplicity, but not without advantage as offering little to distract the worshipper’s attention, and ser- vices are still being held in St. Peter’s on one Sunday of the month. From records of the parish we are able to learn certain facts which perhaps are not of themselves remarkable, but go to show how completely interwoven was the life of the state and that of the church. The first is that the vestry of St. Peter’s, not being able to determine the exact bounds of their parish, appointed one of their number to appear before Francis, Lord Howard, Baron Effingham, then Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, and the council, so that the boundaries between their parish and the adjoining one of Blissland might be determined. Thus we find that the civil government of the colony was called upon to determine who should have the spiritual charge of some of the colonists. The second record shows that the vestry of the church exercised what would nowadays be considered part of the ordinary police powers. In the vestry book of October 5, 1687, one may read that “It is ordered that Mr. Thomas Mitchell do prosecute ye woman servant belonging to Captain Jo. Forster for having a bastard EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 35 child”; such an offence was perhaps rather against moral law than civil law, but in those days there was no distinction made between the two, and the state regulated the affairs of the church with as little doubt of its authority as the vestry displayed in regulating the petty criminal affairs of the neigh- borhood. It will be noticed in the order of construction of this building that Will Hughes was instructed to draw a draft of the church, but as to who Will Hughes was, or what were his qualifications in design, we have no further knowledge. Architects were even more of a luxury then than they are now, and there were very few men in England who exercised solely the functions of the architect of to-day; most of them were builders or masons who by reason of their ability to draw were given authority over those of their co-workers who were unable to thus lay out their working plans. These two churches, St. Peter’s in Kent County, and St. Luke’s in Smithfield, are all that remain of the very early generation of Colonial churches in Virginia, and we find them stylistically distinct from the later work, exhibiting, it is true, some slight beginnings of the classic styles in which most of our church buildings are designed, but resembling rather the earlier type of church building in England. In New England the earliest buildings resembled no English buildings at all, either of the earlier or later type, but a style was evolved which was peculiar to the period. Practically all the first church buildings were square or very 36 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES nearly square, with a hipped roof and a belfry balanced on the peak of the hips. That this type was the usual one is proved by the abundance of wood cuts of the early churches which show them as being almost invariably built in this manner, even to the log churches, which were the first of all. They re- sembled rather blockhouses than churches or temples, and the type having been established by these early buildings seems to have been continued with slight variations until the middle of the eighteenth century. They were built for defence as well as for worship, and a provision of the law in Massachusetts which prohibited any man from building a dwelling except within half a mile from the nearest church soon made the church buildings the nuclei of settlements. They were at first set upon the hilltops so that a watch in the belfry would be able to discover the approach of hostile savages from any direction, and trees were not permitted to grow near them, perhaps be- cause they wished to offer no shelter to an approaching enemy, and perhaps because the Roman temples were set in groves of trees. The earlier buildings were surrounded by stockades, but as the danger from savages became less, the buildings lost somewhat of their fortified character, and stockades were done away with, but the early type was continued even though built of the lighter materials. The only church of the seventeenth century remaining in New England is the so-called “Ship Meeting House” at Hingham, which was a plain, good-sized square structure with a hipped ‘Tadd ‘NOLONINTIM ‘HOUNHO ,SAadaMS ATO “Idd ‘NOLONINTIM ‘HOUNHD SCAMS AIO SHOMIALNI me EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 37 roof and a small belfry. In shape it was not at all unlike the first buildings, and while possessing no very great amount of beauty in itself, it is interesting both because of its antiquity and be- cause it marks a period of development in American archi- tecture. The first meeting house at Hingham was built soon after the settlement in 1635, and possessed what was at that time the unique distinction that there was a bell in its belfry. The third meeting house at Hingham, which is the present one, was built in 1681, and on the 5th of January in 1682 a town meet- ing was held for the first time in the new house, and the Sun- day following two children were baptized in it. The building was erected by direct taxation on the one hundred and forty- three members of the congregation, costing them four hundred ‘and thirty pounds, nearly a quarter of the value of the personal property of the Plymouth colony. It is said that the building was built by ship’s carpenters, and it is seldom we find frame- work so skilfully put together that it is able to withstand the wear and tear of over two centuries. In the case of the old ‘Ship Meeting House,” however, we are shown that the tim- bers were selected and erected in the year 1680. On May 3, 1680, the selectmen were directed to carry on the business of building a new meeting house, and at the same meeting it was voted to set it up where the old one then stood. Violent conflicts took place in regard to the placing of the meet- ing house, in which the interference of the general council was 38 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES required. A tradition is handed down that the site for the meeting house was fixed on the lower plain, that the day was appointed for the raising of the frame, but that on the preced- ing night it was carried to the spot where the meeting house now stands. On August 11, 1680, the dimensions of the house were fixed by a vote of the town, these being fifty-five feet in length, forty-five feet in breadth, and the height of the posts twenty feet. There were galleries on the sides and porch end. On May 2, 1681, the town approved of what the selectmen had done in relation to the new meeting house and its location. New England can boast of many of the quaint religious land- marks of the colonists. The severe taste of all of these settlers is exemplified in the style of the architecture employed in “Old Ship.” It is interesting to know that the building was given its peculiar name because of its construction. The roof is in the form of a truncated pyramid surmounted by a belfry and lookout station. This “lookout” has given the church its nautical nickname; surmounting the belfry is a weather- vane. The church stands to-day, as far as the exterior is con- cerned, just as it was originally erected, except for a small porch added to the west side. The interior of the church is rather prosaic, and whatever elaboration we find is the product of the last few years. As will be seen in the illustration shown herewith, the bell rope is allowed to dangle in the centre aisle, the pulpit is rather a EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 39 massive structure, and a curiously contrived canopy answers for.a sounding board. The organ was not introduced until the year 1866. The first music in the church was simply furnished by a pitch pipe, this giving place to the flute, and then to the clarionet, and the church seems to have been remarkable even in New England for the extreme to which the piety of its con- gregation proceeded. It was a minister of Hingham who “once on hearing some others laugh very freely while I sup- posed he was better busied in his room above, he came down and said thus ‘cousins I wonder how you can be so merry un- less you are sure of your salvation.’”’ It probably never. oc- curred to this gentleman that they might be just as sure of their salvation as he was uncertain of’his; there is a legend that the Hingham church was about the last in which the solemnization of marriage by the clergy was permitted. One does not know why marriage by the clergy was considered such an evil thing by the early Puritans, but it was, and even prayers for the dead were prohibited. The church building was some- how expressive of the tendency of its congregations: austere, square, and yet somehow cocky and self-confident; an inter- esting building but hardly a beautiful one. The two other old churches which are illustrated in this chapter, “Gloria Dei” at Philadelphia, and Trinity Church, otherwise known as Old Swede’s, Wilmington, Delaware, were begun in the closing years of the seventeenth century: 40 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES “Gloria Dei” in 1697, and old Swede’s in 1698. They were both branches of the State Church of Sweden, the Evangeli- cal Lutheran, and, as stated above, were governed direct from the Swedish Church authorities. The earlier of the two, “Gloria Dei,” was begun on Sep- tember 19, 1697, and was dedicated on July 2, 1700, the con- gregation which built the church having been consolidated from the congregations which had previously met in two meeting houses, one in Wycacoa, and the other at Tranhook, and fifty-seven families were represented at the meeting which decided to build this church. The building was sixty feet long, thirty feet wide, and twenty feet high; the foundations were of stone and the walls of brick; no tower was constructed with the rest of the building, as the congregation was in doubt as to whether it could procure a chime of bells. While the walls were thick, they were apparently not substantial enough to resist the thrust of the roof timbers, and in 1704 a sacristy erected adjoining the north end of the structure, and the vestibule built against the south side, acted as buttresses. In 1710 permission was granted to members of the Church of England resident in Philadelphia to use this church for their services, and, in view of the intolerance which existed through- out the colonies at this date, it is a pleasant surprise to find that at the Church of England services a hymn was sung in Swedish to express the harmony between the two con- gregations. Swedish as a language for the Lutheran service EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 41 was gradually forgotten, and services are now held in English. The land on which the church stands was given by one of the congregation, and although the Swedish colonists were both ignorant and poor, they supported their church building in such a whole-hearted way that when the edifice was ded- icated it was described by its pastor in these words: “Through God’s blessing we have completed a great work, and have built a church superior to any in this country, so that the English themselves, who now govern this province and are beyond measure richer than we are, wonder at what we have done.” Buildings in America must have been primitive in- deed when such a little plain structure as this could surpass all other existing churches; and while there is a great deal that is quaint and interesting, both in the interior and the exterior of the building, it has no very great pretensions to architectural merit. The galleries in the interior were not part of the original scheme, and it is probable that most of the interior woodwork as it now exists was also added at some time subsequent to the erection of the building, but it is not only agreeable in design, but is also harmonious with the balance of the building. Trinity at Wilmington was dedicated on Trinity Sunday, 1699, and the dimensions of the original building were pre- cisely the same as those of “Gloria Dei”: sixty feet long, thirty feet wide, and twenty feet high. The walls were built of granite laid in clay, and pointed up in lime mortar, and the 42 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES builders, in order to insure durability, made the foundation wall six feet thick, while the superstructure at the windows is three feet thick. The plan is rather interesting, since the portion of the building to the right of the doorway is un- obstructed to the roof, while a small gallery extends across nearly half the church at the left, and is reached by the stair- case partly on the exterior and partly in the interior, beginning at the entrance porch. While this church was begun a year after “Gloria Dei,” it was completed a year before the other church, and as in the case of “Gloria Dei,” one of the con- gregation gave the land for the building. The expense of construction was eight hundred pounds, a very large sum for any church congregation in those days, and especially for the Swedes, who were at this time entirely cut off from any state support, since New Sweden had been conquered by the Dutch and ceded with New Amsterdam to the English. The settlement, even when this church was built, was an old one, having been founded in 1627, half a century before the settle- ment of Pennsylvania by the Quakers under William Penn. As was the case with “Gloria Dei,” poor roof construction threw the walls out of plumb, and in 1750 buttresses were built and extensive alterations made to stiffen up the walls, and additional windows were introduced at the same time. In 1792 the church decided to adopt the ritual of the Protes- tant Episcopal Church, and was admitted into the diocese of Delaware of the Episcopal Church. EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 43 These two Swedish churches complete the list of church structures remaining from the seventeenth century, and it will be seen that in no case was there much of either historic interest or architectural pretension gathered about them. Perhaps the very fact that they were not centres of strong and prosperous communities has preserved them to us, since without expansion of their congregations new structures were not needed. CHAPTER III NEW ENGLAND CHURCHES OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: ROM the eighteenth century we have remaining some of the handsomest and best designed of all the early American churches, and by contrast with the few small structures dating from the seventeenth century, the period seems particularly rich in buildings architecturally, as well as historically important, since the time during which the colonists were breaking ground for their new settlements was inevitably one of great poverty, and the first buildings were thrown together as hurriedly and as cheaply as could be done, and perhaps were never intended to be anything but” temporary. So in reading of the history of any old congregation, we find that the existing structure is the second, third, or fourth built by the organization, and we find also that the first structure lasted but a few years, and that the second was as a rule greatly enlarged and much repaired before it was replaced by a new one. Rapidly as the colonists came to America during the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century witnessed an even greater influx, and with the thousands of new settlers who 44 ‘VA ‘ALNOQOO LNAM MAN ‘HOUNHO S$ UaLad “Ls WOMWaLxa ‘VA ‘AINNOD INAM MAN ‘HOWNHD SMALGd “LS SMOLMAINI EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 45 came every year, there was a growth in material resources and in wealth more than commensurate with the increase in the population; and with prosperity appeared a spirit of religious tolerance which had been until then unknown, re- sulting in the formation of new sects and new congregations from the original church bodies. While the spiritual and intellectual activities of the seven- teenth century were largely religious, this was not the case in the eighteenth; both centuries were periods of great unrest and discontent with the existing order of things, but as is naturally the case with people who have property interests at stake in addition to their immortal souls, the yearning for religious change and betterment became gradually transformed into a desire for greater political freedom and activity. During the first half of the century, the conditions incident to the open- ing up of a new country well satisfied these desires: there were two wars with the French, as well as continued frontier bicker- ing with the Indians, and the colonists had been too lately removed from England to realize how heavily the English hand was laid upon them, but from about 1750 on, external conditions were tranquil, and internal dissensions arose and yearly became more bitter until they culminated in the Revo- lution. Now as the churches had been from the very beginning of the colonies meeting places for secular as well as for religious bodies, and as the two had been very closely bound together 46 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES through the entire history of the country up to that time, it was inevitable that the churches should be centres of the new discontent, and we find that Faneuil Hall in Boston and Independence Hall in Philadelphia were not more used as places of assembly by patriotic bodies than were the churches whose congregations comprised them. Therefore the history of the churches still existing from the eighteenth century will show that Old North and Old South in Boston, St. Michael’s in Charleston, and St. Peter’s in Philadelphia, have as much political as ecclesiastical history connected with them. Of all the New England churches the congregations of Old North and Old South in Boston were the leaders in this politi- cal activity, partly because they were metropolitan churches, and partly because from the very foundation of these congrega- tions they had been composed of men of unusual intellectual vigor and of independence of thought. Both were offshoots of the first congregation in Boston, and their separation from the parent body was caused by political dissension rather than for economic or religious reasons. Of the two, Old North was the older congregation; it was founded in 1650 because of factions arising among members of the First Church over the execution of Charles I, and the new church, known officially as the Second Church of Christ, was, because of the geographical location of its building, called the North Church, and later “Old North.” The first church building was erected EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 47 about 1652, and is described as having been a large, square structure with a high pulpit and high-backed pews, some of which had doors which led into a side street; a matter of some convenience, it would seem, during the two-hour sermons of the early ministers. In 1673 it was burned down and re- placed by a larger building with a low belfry, which lasted ap- parently until its destruction by the British forces during the siege of Boston in the years 1775 and 1776. The siege was so closely maintained and the winter so cold that it became necessary to tear down a certain number of the old structures for fuel, and the Old North Church was selected as one of these because its congregation had taken so forward a part in Revo- lutionary activities. The facts regarding the old church appear thus far to be fairly clear, but there is certainly no other of the prominent early buildings about whose date of erection and designer there has been so much confusion as Old North. “The Geor- gian Period” attributes it to Charles Bullfinch, and dates it in the nineteenth century; various ecclesiastical histories give different dates for its erection, usually prior to the date that they assign for the destruction of the older building, and after a careful study of the subject the facts seem to be as follows: some time early in the eighteenth century the con- gregation of the Second Church, or Old North, split, and the seceding faction erected a building known as the New Brick Church. This structure was erected in 1723 and was designed 48 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES by a Boston print seller and draughtsman named William Price. Price had*made a study of the London churches of which Sir Christopher Wren was the architect, and, though apparently without technical training, made the drawings for this building as a result of those studies. There is a story to the effect that the present building, known as Old North, was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, which seems to have had no other foundation than that given above, and while one finds in the church histories of many of the older American churches that Wren was their architect, there seems to have been not the slightest foundation for any of them, and ap-- parently the only existing American church which was not of native design is St. Michael’s at: Charleston. Now when the Old North Church was burned down in 1776 its congregation was invited to worship with that of the New Brick Church; the two were reunited after fifty years of separate existence, and the congregation of Old North being the older and more famous of the two, the name seems to have been transferred to the New Brick Church, which is apparently the one now known as Old North. Another story attributing the design to Charles Bullfinch appears to have arisen from the fact. that early in the nineteenth century he made designs for the reconstruction or restoration of the old building, and it is said that when the tower blew down, in 1804, it was re- constructed from these designs. The writer feels reasonably certain that 1723 is the correct — SBR SOS OLD NORTH CHURCH, BOSTON, MASS, = = a sateen a ~ Xs “SSVW ‘NOLSOd ‘HOUNHD HLYON G10 Ao WOraaLNi EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 49 date for the erection of the church, and that William Price was the designer, but since the congregation of the older North Church, the New Brick Church, and the New North Church were at various times identical there has been fertile ground for confusion and error. Among the ministers who were at various times in charge of this congregation were two who stand out with prominence: the Reverend Increase Mather, the third incumbent, and Ralph Waldo Emerson; Increase Mather was perhaps the greatest of the early New England divines, a man of eloquence, culture, and ability, a very different type from his son, Cotton Mather of Salem, of witchcraft notoriety; of Emerson nothing need be said. The congregation of Old North was, prior to the Revolution- ary War, one of the most active in fomenting rebellion against the English crown; it was distinctly a civic church of the city of Boston, and not one of the churches dependent upon the imposed government by the British officials. It was even employed. as a firehouse and public arsenal by the corporation of the city, and it may be worth recalling also that it was from the steeple of Old North that the lamps to signal Paul Revere were hung — “One if by land, and two if by sea.” Since the Revolution the church history has been one of quiet activities and without particular points of interest to the general reader. Architecturally, the quality of the building depends, as in 50 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES many of the other old churches, upon its tower and the design of the interior; the body of the building is a simple, rec- tangular structure with two tiers of circular headed windows; the tower is an excellent piece of design: slim, light, and elegant, the lower portion of brick, and the upper part of wood, and although its succeeding stages are stepped back in the frankest way, they have no tendency in appearance to “‘tele- scope”; the interior is perhaps more interesting than excellent; the superimposed order with square columns, the lower one supporting the balcony paneled, and the upper one fluted, is not particularly well proportioned, and the plaster-vaulted ceiling is so. obviously not structural that the building loses in dignity. The design, while it has the inherent charm of most old work, is evidently the product of an untrained man, and it is a subject remarkable for archeological, rather-than ar- chitectural, value. Not very dissimilar from the Old North Church in Boston is Trinity Church at Newport, Rhode Island, which is re- ported to have been built in 1726, three years after the Boston church; and it seems extremely probable that it was architecturally greatly influenced by the older building. Its history is not without a certain curious interest: the parish was organized by Sir Francis Nicholson, a Lieutenant Gov- ernor of New York in 1688, but it was necessary for him first to secure permission to form it from Governor Andros of Massachusetts, and although the parish was then organized, EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 51 no church structure was erected until 1702, and the church had apparently no rector until that time. Following the custom of the Episcopal Church in the American colonies, the organizers of the parish sent to London for a rector, and the Bishop of London, who was bishop of the colonies as well, appointed the Reverend James Honeyman. Queen Anne gave the bell to the church; royal gifts appear to have been more or less the custom when new parishes were begun in the colonies, and we find that most of the American parishes of very early date possess a bell, a communion set, or a lectern, or other piece of church furniture, contributed by the head of the Church of England to the new foundation. Peter Harrison is reported to have been the architect of this building, but as Peter Harrison has been also given as the architect of King’s Chapel, Boston, and other churches built toward the latter end of the eighteenth century, it seems im- probable that he was designing at this early date, nor does the building itself bear any internal evidence of being his design. The story that he was the architect for this church building seems no more probable than that it was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, which is another legend which has gained some credence. There seems to be pretty definite evidence that Old North Church was designed by William Price, and Trinity was so evidently influenced by the architecture of the older building, resembling it so greatly both in the interior and exterior, that the writer is pretty well convinced that either 52 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES the one church was a copy. from the other, or that the architect was the same person. The identification of pictures by in- ternal evidence and their assignment to different painters, on this ground alone, and without documentary proof, and with- out signature, has long been accepted as a rational method of procedure; the work of one architect differs from that of another quite as definitely as does the work of one painter from another, so that in modern times we would find it not at all difficult to assign to McKim, Mead, and White, let us say, or to Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, all the works of their maturer periods without much liability of error, and a similar practice applied to these two old churches would be sufficient to convince an architect, at least, that if they were not the work of the same hands, one was a distinct copy from the other. The old building of Trinity Church has, like most of the pre-Revolutionary churches, had a somewhat disturbed career; in 1729, the Reverend George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, who was the author of the poem beginning, “Westward the course of empire makes its way,” started for the Bermudas with the cause of education in view, but encountering a severe storm the vessel was driven from its course, and the captain — finally came into Newport harbor one Sunday morning. The Reverend Mr. Honeyman, being apprised of his arrival during services, went with his congregation in a body to meet the distinguished clergyman, and in appreciation of the reception TRINITY CHURCH, NEWPORT, R. I. ‘Il °Y SLYOdMAN SHOUNHO ALINIUL UOTUILNI os pMipiy Yi ‘ . . . \ MAE: EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 53 which he met, the Bishop of Cloyne presented the organ to the church. During the Revolutionary War, Newport was held for some time by the British, and the rebel parishioners left the town. After the Continental forces reéntered the city, the insignia of the royal family of England, which had hitherto decorated the church wall, were torn from it and used for targets for cannon practice. Little other alteration has been made in the decorated portions of the building, although in 1762 the body of the church was sawn in two and the back moved up and the space between the rear and front portions filled in, in con- formity with the older work. The chances for its preservation are good, since as long as Newport continues to be the fashion- able summer resort it is to-day, the old church will probably be preserved by its congregation as a sort of monumental bric-a-brac. The tower is hardly inferior to that of the Old North Church, although built of wood, and the interior is rather more attractive than the older one. It is one of the few old churches in which superimposed orders were used, the lower to support the gallery, and the upper to support a vaulted ceiling, and it is the only church other than Old North in which the columns of this order were square. The resemblance to Old North is further heightened by the fact that the lower order had paneled sides, and the columns of the upper order were fluted. The general effect of the in- terior is interesting, although not very dignified, since the 54 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES superfluity of vaulting is restless and disturbing, specially in a building so obviously of frame. Many of the accessories of the interior are both old and well designed, notably the pulpit canopy and the candelabra, and the old square pews still remain in their original positions, instead of the present “slip” type which James Fenimore Cooper so deplored as a modern innovation. Of all the early American churches there is none which has played so prominent a part in civic affairs as “Old South,” in Boston. From the time when its congregation was formed it has been a centre, not so much for religious as for political activities of the same constructive kind that have gone to make the United States of to-day. Judged by modern standards, the men who founded it could hardly have been called largely tolerant, but in New England, in the middle of the seventeenth century, they were considered so broad- minded as almost deserving to be cast without the pale of recognized Christianity into the outer darkness with the Quakers, Baptists, and Episcopalians. As has been before re- corded, church membership was a necessary qualification to citizenship, but as the Massachusetts colony grew, church membership became more and more difficult to obtain, until the colony became a sort of religious aristocracy with a large portion, if not a majority, of its subjects disfranchised because they were dissenters from the covenanting churches. In 1662 the General Synod of Massachusetts churches was OLD SOUTH CHURCH, BOSTON, MASS. ‘SSVI ‘NOLSOd SHOUNHO HLNOS AIO SYOIMALNI EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 55 convened to discuss this matter, certain of the citizens holding that baptism was the only necessary requisite for citizenship, but the synod recommended that church membership be con- tinued as the condition. Twenty-nine of the members of the First Church of Boston, including the most respectable among the residents of the city, refused to agree on this matter and formed the third congregation, eventually building the South Meeting House. In accordance with the requirements of the time, it was necessary to obtain from the other churches per- mission to form a new church; this was denied, and permission was then asked of the Governor of the colony to build a church building. The Governor again denied it, but the selectmen of Boston, to whom the twenty-nine next appealed, granted it. The independence of authority which marked the proced- ure of the congregation in the very founding of this church was characteristic of it throughout, and just as at first they appealed from the supreme authority to a council of selectmen, so later they appealed from the English Governor of the colony to the assembly of the state at the time of the Revolution. Their first structure was of cedar, two stories high, with a steeple and the conventional interior of the time, but the wives and children of the congregation were forbidden by the First Church under pain of excommunication to sever their con- nection from the parent church, and it was not until 1674 that the general council of the colony of Massachusetts permitted them to be joined with the male members of their family, and 56 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES the bitterness engendered between the first congregation and the third (that of Old South) lasted until they joined together in fighting the Episcopalians when these attempted to estab- lish a congregation in Boston. It is a curious commentary on the habits and thought of that day, that in spite of the fact that both congregations were purely dissenting congregations, and that their ministers were neither ordained nor recognized by the Church of England, each of these churches during the course of their squabble appealed to the Bishop of London to back it up. The fight between the congregations ran so high that when Old South began to build its church, some years after the formation of its congregation, the Governor of the colony (being a member of the First Church) endeavored to stop its construction, and called together a council “to con- sider the danger of a tumult; some persons attempting to set up an edifice for public worship which was apprehended by the authority to be detrimental to the public peace.” During the days of the witchcraft delusion, the pastor of Old South, the Reverend Samuel Willard, preached very vigorously against the cruelties of the time, and compelled Judge Sewall to confess publicly and to express his repentance for the part he had taken. This was but another instance of the sane and liberal view which this church had taken in public affairs from the time of its foundation, and it seems but proper that Benjamin Franklin, of all our early statesmen the sanest, kindest, and wisest, should have been baptized in this church, EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 57 as he was in 1706. In 1730 the second building for the con- gregation, the present edifice, was built, the designer being Robert Twelves. It was built of brick laid in Flemish bond, the steeple continued up in wood to the height of one hundred and eighty feet, the body of the building being nearly square with a double row of windows, the plan being the auditorium one common to the early churches, and which has of late years come into favor for the church structures of some of our sects. The exterior is severely plain, and the spire, while agreeable endugh, has nothing of the grace and beauty of the earlier ones of Old North and Trinity Church in Newport. The old- fashioned pulpit with its suspended sounding board is very beautifully designed, and while the second gallery unquestion- ably hurts the appearance of the interior, it is said to be of later introduction and not part of the original design. The church history in its new building has been as eventful as it was in the old; in 1740 the noted English evangelist, George Whitefield, preached there, and in 1745, during the French and Indian War, it was in this building that the city of Boston held a mass meeting to pray for divine intervention between them and a French fleet then on its way to destroy the city. The story goes that the services began on a bright and sun- shiny day, and from this cloudless sky there arose a terrible storm which destroyed the French fleet, and every member of the congregation agreed with one of their ministers, the Reverend Mr. Burdett, that “it was from this pulpit that in 58 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES earlier times went hence to heaven that prayer which was answered by the dispersion and utter ruin of a hostile fleet of France.”” ‘This mass meeting was probably the first held in South Church; mass meetings in this building became more and more usual, and it was customary for overflow meetings in Faneuil Hall to be held in this building, or, when the meet- ings were too great to be accommodated in Faneuil Hall, they were held in the larger auditorium of Old South. On June 14, 1768, the meeting was held there which sent John Hancock as a delegate to the Governor to ask that the Boston port be opened again, and it was after another meeting in the Old South, on December 14, 1773, that the Boston “‘tea party” occurred. During the winter of 1774-75, as was the case with Old North, it felt very bitterly the enmity inspired in the British by the activities of its congregation, and the interior fittings were torn out and burned, and the floor space used as a riding school for Burgoyne’s cavalry. Until 1782 its congregation worshipped in King’s Chapel, their old feud with the Episcopalians having by this time become completely healed. The building is no longer used as a church, but belongs to a society composed of Boston women who keep it as a sort of historical museum. They have not, however, changed the building in any important part, and the exterior is as it was originally constructed, with the interior as it was reconstructed after the Revolutionary War. SSNS ee eee KING’S CHAPEL, BOSTON, MASS. ‘SSVI ‘NOLSOM “THdVHD SONIM SMOIUALINI ‘ =, 4 Tv" a rs Ul 7 " } 1 ft on 2% ban ad y PTE Felt . Zi o $ €a EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 59 King’s Chapel was the first edifice erected for the Protestant Episcopal Church in New England, and its construction was caused not by any crying need of members of the Church of England for a house of worship of their own, but by direct governmental interposition. The British Crown, that is to say the Church of England, sent a minister of the established church to Boston, together with members of the commission appointed by King James II to preside over the church in the colonies, and these gentlemen asked permission of each of the congregations then owning church buildings in the city of Boston to worship in one or other of them, but although nom- ‘inally these churches were still in some way connected with, or dependent upon, the church in England, the commission was curtly refused, and services were finally held in a large room of the Town House until Governor Andros ordered the trustees of Old South to open their building for Episcopal worship. ' The first services held in Old South were held on Good Friday, March 4th, in 1687. The forced acquiescence of the con- gregation of Old South to this action of brotherly love was by no means cheerful, and because the Episcopalians were backed up by the Governor of the colony, they did not trouble themselves to suit the convenience of the.congregation which really owned Old South. Judge Sewall wrote about one of their meetings as follows: “Last Sabbath day, March 27, Govr. and his retinue met in our Meetingh at eleven; broke off half-past two, bec. of ye sacrement and Mr. Clark’s long 60 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES sermon, though we were appointed to come half-past one; so ’twas a sad sight to see how full ye street was with people gazing and moving to and fro, bec. had no entrance into ye house.” The congregation of King’s Chapel wanted very earnestly to erect a building of their own, but were unable to find any one who would sell them property enough on which to build, so that at last the Governor had again to intervene, setting aside a corner of the burial ground for their use, and the first building was completed in 1689. In 1710 it was en- larged to twice its former size, and in its remodeling the vestry stipulated that each member should pay the cost of building his own pew; this was accordingly done, but without any uni- formity, so that the interior of the old church must have presented an amusing diversity of work. Fronting the pulpit were two large square pews, one for the family of the rector and one for the use of the Governor and his staff, two long ' pews behind them were reserved, one for the ‘“‘ Masters of the Vessels,” and one for eight old men of the parish. The walls were decorated with banners, escutcheons, and coats of arms of the King of England, of the nobility and gentry of the con- gregation, and of the governor of the province, and the in- terior was considered so magnificent and so luxurious as to be a blot upon the religion of Massachusetts. In 1741 it was decided that the chapel was no longer large enough to accommodate the parish, and a committee, with Peter Faneuil as treasurer, was appointed to raise funds for iE! MM LAY Sen HA) ha FIRST CHURCH, DEDHAM, MASSACHUSETTS SPIRE OF THE OLD NORTH, OR CHRIST, CHURCH, BOSTON eA ia SPIRE OF THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH, PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND ‘ x EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 61 a new building. This was begun in 1749, and occupied in 1753. The design for the building was probably made by (Peter?) Harrison, an architectural amateur whom we find spoken about in connection with other of the early church structures, and the church history states: “Mr. Harrison, of ‘Rhode Island, a gentleman of good judgment in architecture, was asked to oblige the parish with a drawing of a handsome church agreeable to the limits set forth.” ‘The drawings are now lost,.and it was not known whether they were very closely followed, but as we do know the congregation was well pleased with them, it is reasonable to suppose that they were, with the exception of a spire which was part of the original design and was not executed for lack of funds. ‘ The colonnade around the tower which distinguishes this building from any of the other, churches of the same age was not part of the original design, but was added in 1790, and the cost of the building without this colonnade was £2,500, a very moderate. sum for a cut stone building with the lovely interior that it possesses. The interior deserves more than a passing glance; it is one of. the’ best-designed classic church interiors in the United States, and while not in principle very dissimilar from those of Old North and Trinity Church in Newport, there las been so much more regard paid to structural lines, and to a careful proportion of the. orders, that the result is infinitely superior. As was the case with most of the other early Episcopal churches: in America, the supreme head of the church, the English king 62 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES or queen, personally presented certain fittings to it; King James II sent the original congregation a pulpit still in use in the church, and a communion service; Queen Anne sent a red silk damask cushion for the pulpit, surplices for the rector and choir, and altar linen; a clock was presented by a gentleman of the British Society in Boston, and the organ, for many years the best in America, was purchased through the inistrumen- tality of the great composer Handel. In 1772 King George III presented an additional communion service and the pulpit, and King’s Chapel was regarded as more or less the royal pet until the Revolution. The congregation originally was without title, but the building was called the Queen’s Chapel, and in 1702 the name was changed to King’s Chapel. Being a Tory church, it suffered no damage during the British occupancy of Boston, and forgetting the old feud with the members of Old South Church, that congregation was invited to worship in the chapel until its own building could be restored, and for nearly five years the congregations worshipped in the same building. Since the Revolution practically no change has been made in the structure, except that the Governor’s pew was removed and the royal emblems taken down, but the chapel is no longer Episcopalian, being the first church in the United States to become openly Unitarian. The First Church at Dedham, Massachusetts, is most typi- cal of many New England meeting houses of its time; built EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 63 in 1763, without any designer of record, its dimensions were laid out by the building committee, and the contractor was directed to follow them, and for design to look to one of the London churches that the committee admired. Such, at least, is the story, and if the builder had actually a picture of the London churches before him, in constructing this build- ing, he was either very incapable or wilfully departed from the original scheme, for there is no London church which bears any resemblance to this one. In 1819-20 the building was altered, the tower being put on the opposite end, and the direction of the roof changed; for this change, likewise, no architect was employed, but though these changes were of considerable importance, they do not greatly alter the char- acter of the old building. The first church edifice was built in 1647, and in 1673 the second building was erected; the third, and present one, having been begun in 1763, the expense being paid for by the sale of pews on the first floor, and it may be of interest to notice that the wealthiest man in town had the first choice, the next wealthiest second choice, and so on, their order being determined by the amount of taxes which they paid. These pews were then owned by the family as long as they continued to support the minister. The structure is mainly interesting because it is so similar to many of the simpler country churches in the eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- turies; it was one, in fact, whose design was duplicated almost 64 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES without change, and while it is a sufficiently dignified and attractive structure, its architectural merit is by no means great, nor does it show the individuality of the Meeting House at Farmington. The Meeting House at Farmington was constructed in 1771 after designs by Captain Judah Woodruff, who was an archi- tect and builder with a considerable practice in and about Farmington. Although this is reported to have been his only church structure, its influence is both potent and far-reach- ing, and certain of its details were later adapted by Asher Benjamin to some of the designs published in his various books, and a number of the early American nineteenth century churches resemble the Farmington church to a marked degree. We happen to know a little more about Captain Woodruff than we do of any of the other architects of this early date. He was a home product, captain in the local militia, educated under other carpenters, and with a natural taste for design” stimulated by the possession of the very excellent books on architecture which were the only ones which then existed, and some: of the loveliest of the old Colonial houses which still exist in New England were the product of his hands. He was not less excellent as a builder than as an architect, and this structure, originally built in 1771, has never been reclap- boarded since its erection, and even half the roof shingles originally used are still in place. The congregation was an old one, and this was its third house of worship. The other THE MEETING HOUSE, FARMINGTON, CONN. ‘NNOD ‘NOLONINUVA ‘FSNOH ONILFAW AHL SMOMMaLINI EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 65 two had been, as was usual in New England, erected in the centre of the village, but the location was changed when the third structure was built, and the hipped roof, up to then com- mon in the country districts of New England, was changed toa gable roof, although the auditorium plan, with a principal en- trance at the centre, was retained. The west porch is probably a later addition at the time of the Greek Revival, and the inte- rior likewise bears evidence of a corresponding remodeling, the curious turned posts which support the gallery, the “slip” pews, and the organ having been put in place about 1836, although the original pulpit was retained until 1901, when the present pulpit was installed in memory of Noah Porter. Captain Woodruff is said to have gone to an old church in Wethersfield for his inspiration, but his construction must have been surely a product of his own ingenuity; it was so excellent that the ridge pole has sagged only an inch and a half in the one hundred and forty years of the life of the church. The light columns which support the belfry are only the tops of posts which run down through the body of the tower for twenty-five feet, and are so braced and tied together that they are still strong and plumb, and the care used throughout the construction is evident from the fact that the heads of the hand-wrought bolts used to join it together bear marks corre- sponding with marks on the edges of the hole through which they were driven. The last of the churches illustrated in this chapter is the 66 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES First Baptist Church at Providence, Rhode Island. It will be recalled that when Roger Williams was expelled from Massachusetts he was instrumental in founding the Baptist Church in Rhode Island, and though in his latter days he was hardly in good standing even with that church, the congregation which he founded (the oldest Baptist con- gregation of the United States) was that which at present oc- cupies this, the oldest Baptist Church building still existing. It was designed by a Mr. Joseph Brown, of Providence, and begun in 1775; the designer was not by profession an architect or a builder, but was a merchant with a taste for the higher education; he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a trustee of Brown University. An interesting side light on the methods of design in those days is afforded by the history of this building. Mr. Joseph Brown and Mr. Hammond, both influential men in the congregation, were sent to Boston “in order to view the different churches and make a memoranda of their several dimensions and forms of architecture.” Mr. Brown, being something of a draughts- man, became responsible for this agreeable church structure, which bears testimony in a general way to the effect of this Boston visit on the designer, although it resembles in detail none of the existing Boston churches. The tower is very superior, and the interior is not unpleasant, but the high basement, with the bad entrance at the base of the tower, de- tracts very greatly from its effect, and it seems to the writer EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 67 open to question as to whether the tower was part of the original design, as it resembles rather the work of the early nineteenth century than the mid-eighteenth century Boston designs. Perhaps the most attractive single feature of the interior is the wonderful cut-glass chandelier, one of the hand- somest pieces of Colonial design in lighting fixtures which is still preserved, and the contrast between this chandelier and the gas fixtures of Victorian design projecting from the gal- leries between the columns is startling to see, and is eloquent though mute testimony to the degeneracy of the Victorian period. The history of the congregation has been a quiet and peaceful one, remote from wars and rumors of wars, and was for many years closely connected with that of Brown University, the commencements of the university having been held in this building until very recently. This completes the list of eighteenth century churches illustrated, but does not completely exhaust the available ma- terial, and it may be worth while to note here the names of some of the others which have still been preserved. Christ Church in Cambridge, and the Jewish Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, were both designed by Peter Har- rison, presumably the same Harrison who designed King’s Chapel, since Christ Church is not dissimilar in character from King’s Chapel, and the interior of the Jewish Synagogue also resembles it. Neither of these two buildings, however, has much historical importance, except that the synagogue is the 68 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES oldest Jewish place of worship still existing in this country, and, as already said, they are not especially valuable in design. St. Michael’s, at Marblehead, is quaint without being otherwise excellent, and although it was built in 1714, is with- out especial historic interest. It was one of the earliest Episcopal churches in New England, and was erected because the seafaring population was strong and was closely affiliated with the English church; in fact twenty-nine out of the original thirty-three men of the congregation were sea captains. The Congregational Church at Southampton, Massachu- setts, built in 1788; the Congregational Church at Enfield, Massachusetts, built in 1787; the church at West Springfield, built in 1799; that at Longmeadow, built in 1767; that at East Haddam, built in 1794; and that of Wethersfield, Connecticut, built in 1761; complete the list known to the writer, but none of these buildings is either historically or architecturally in- teresting, and to illustrate them would be to repeat the designs of some of those already shown, but less well done, and they have therefore not been photographed, the “writer believing ‘that the. ground has been very well covered, both historically and architecturally, without them. vot i, R. THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH, PROVIDENCE, LSILdVd LSuld WOlMaLNI ‘I ‘ud SAONACGIAOUd S‘HOUNHO CHAPTER IV SOUTHERN CHURCHES OF THE EIGHTEENTH / CENTURY HE southern churches of this period were mainly of brick in Virginia and North Carolina, and of stone or stucco in South Carolina and Georgia, and the large majority were small, uninteresting, and without historical im- portance. In Virginia, for example, there remain perhaps a dozen churches which are not illustrated in this book, such as St. Paul’s in Norfolk, Blandford Church, St. John’s in Richmond, Christ Church in Lancaster County, and Yeoco- mico Church in Westmoreland County. With the exception of St. John’s in Richmond all of these were small brick struc- tures without towers, and with the plainest possible interiors and exteriors; while in some cases distinguished men were noted among their parishioners, none of these churches ever ‘was a centre of historical interest comparable with Bruton Parish Church, Christ Church in Alexandria, or St. Michael’s in Charleston. The oldest of the eighteenth century churches illustrated is the Bruton Parish Church, at Williamsburg, Virginia. Wil- liamsburg became the Colonial capital of the Virginia colony in 1699, and was a town of marked importance throughout the 69 70 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES Colonial period; to-day it is almost unknown, because its loca- tion has no commercial value, and the removal of the legisla- ture to Richmond deprived it of its principal reason for existence. In Colonial times, however, it was a very important little city; the parish was founded in 1674; the College of William and Mary was established there in 1693, this being, next to Harvard, the oldest American college. The parish was formed from three of the oldest of the Virginia parishes, originally known as Middle Plantation, Harup, and Marston; its present name, “Bruton,” was a mark of respect to one of its early parishioners, Sir James Ludlow, whose birthplace was Bruton, Somerset County, England. The present build- ing was the third of a series of churches located on the same site, and some of the furnishings and foundations of the earlier buildings were incorporated into the structure, as was proven by the discovery of an old cornerstone under the present building bearing the following inscription: ‘November ye 29th, 1683; Whereas ye Brick Church at Middle Plantation is now finished, It is ordered that all ye inhabitants of ye said Parish do for the future repair thither to hear Divine Service and ye Word of God preached; and that Mr. Rowland Jones, Minister, do dedicate ye said Church, ye sixth of January next, being ye Epiphany.” About its designer we have no certain information; it was said that the then Governor of the colony, Alexander Spotswood, made and furnished the drawings, and from what BRUTON PARISH CHURCH, WILLIAMSBURG, VA. “VA SOUNISNVITTIIM ‘HOUNHD HSINvd NOLAUA SAOIMALNI AGEs EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 71 we know of the activities of the gentleman amateur in art of that day, it seems quite likely that this was the case. We do know just how funds were provided: Governor Spotswood proposed that the vestry should build the two ends of the church, and promised that the government “would take care of the wings and intervening part.” The House of Burgesses agreed to appropriate a sufficient sum of money to build pews for the Governor, Council, and the House of Burgesses, and appointed a committee to codperate with the vestry in its construction. The land for the church and the churchyard surrounding it and twenty pounds toward the construction of the building were given by Colonel John Page, who was allowed to put up a pew in the chancel. - The structure was proceeded with about as outlined in Governor Spotswood’s plan, the Governor himself paying for twenty-two feet of nave, while the wings and crossing were built at the expense of the House of Burgesses who fixed by resolution the length of the transepts at nineteen feet. The church was completed and the first services held in 1715, but as originally built this did not include the tower, which was constructed in 1769, and at the same time the wings were reduced from nineteen feet projection to fourteen and one- half feet; exclusive of these the size of the church was twenty- eight feet by seventy-five feet. In 1839 the pulpit was removed and the interior of the church divided up to form a Sunday-school, but in 1905 the old pulpit and pews were re- 72 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES placed in their former positions, and at that time also the canopy with its velvet curtain, embroidered with the name of Alexander Spotswood, was unearthed and restored to its position over the Governor’s pew. The historical associations of the church, because of its ‘position at the Colonial capital of Virginia, are many. The original bell was presented by Queen Anne, although the pres- ent one was given by a member of the parish in 1761; the Bible now used was given by Edward VII, and the lectern by President Roosevelt at the time of the restoration of the church, in memory of the three hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the English church in America. Among the members of the church were many of the men most famous in the early days of the colony: Lord Botetort, Lord Dun- more, and others of the royal governors worshipped here, as did the Lees, Peyton Randolph, Patrick Henry, and George Washington; while during the War of the Rebellion the church was used as a hospital. As regards the exterior, the architecture is of the typical Virginia type: brick laid in Flemish bond, a cornice greatly reduced from the usual Colonial pattern, and the tower some- what low and heavy; while the interior, simple as it is, is one of the most attractive in America. The details of the wood- work of the pews with their brass name-plates, of the canopies over the Governor’s pew and pulpit, and of the pulpit itself, are perfect examples of Colonial quality; while the apparently ST. PAUL’S CHURCH, EDENTON, N. Cc. ‘O 'N ‘NOLNAdd ‘HOUNHD S Invd “LS ‘MOIMaLNI € EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 78 unintentional contrast between the simple white walls and the rich colors of the woodwork and hangings is far better than the stencil patterns of Greek design commonly employed to decorate the old American churches. St. Paul’s Church, Edenton, North Carolina, while actually located in that state, should be considered as one of the early group of Virginia churches, both because of its geographical location close to the Virginia line, and its architectural and historical associations, which are with Virginia rather than with North Carolina. It is also, with the exception of the Home Moravian Church at Winston-Salem, and St. Thomas’s at Bath, the only eighteenth century church in the state. St. Thomas’s is a plain, barnlike structure of brick laid up in Flemish bond, without a tower, without an interesting doorway or an interesting interior, and while perhaps the oldest church ‘structure, having been begun in 1734, it is absolutely without any other reason for notice, and was typical of the Virginia group of churches, all of them at the beginning very much alike any dissimilarities in appearance having been due to later additions, such as transepts, aisles, and towers. St. Paul’s, begun in 1735, was substantially built of brick, and in the main has been unchanged since its erection; it is still in good repair. The construction, however, dragged along for a number of years, and the building was not occupied until 1760. The floor was originally of tile, and burials were made in vaults below the floor. These are no longer permitted, 74 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES and the present floor is of wood. The building is sixty feet long by forty feet wide within the walls, the side walls twenty feet high, but as to its architect or designer there is no evidence. Its construction was opposed by many of the members of the parish, and was further retarded by the fact that six chapels had been built in various parts. of the parish in 1741, and the congregation thus decentralized had no particular inclination to support either morally or financially the mother edifice. As bearing on the methods of the construction of the time, the following minutes of the vestry, which constitute a specifica- tion for the six chapels, may be of interest: “The dimensions as here mentioned, viz: Thirty-five foot long and Twenty-two foot and a half wide, Eleven foot in the pitch between Sill and Plate, and a roof; workmanlike, near a squear, and to be good fraim Gott out of Good Timbers .and covered with Good Sipress shingles and good Sleepers and flowers of good plank and seated with Good plank; with three Windows suitable, with a pulpit and all things suitable.” Can one wonder that when the design and construction of church buildings were thus limited by orders of a vestry totally unacquainted with the art of construction the names of the architects have been forgotten? And is it not remarkable that with such fixed limitations, which in every case where the records of early construction have been preserved we find to have been im- posed upon the unhappy designer, Colonial architecture at- tained such a tremendous quality? ST. MICHAEL’S CHURCH, CHARLESTON, S&S. C. : ‘LS ‘YOIWALNI ‘HOUND S$ /TXVHOIN ‘2 "Ss ‘NOLSETUVHO = s * g s PSS sf s : EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 75 St. Paul’s parish was organized in 1701, and it is the oldest organization either civic or religious in North Carolina; its first church building, begun in the year of the organization of the parish, was the first church built in the province. The present building was constructed by voluntary subscription of the parish, and the accounts of the subscription were kept by an anonymous secretary, whose entry in the parish book shows: ““my own subscription £100,” which was, with one other of similar amount, the largest single subscription; but the vestry, not securing money enough in this way, eventually charged a tax levy on the whole parish, and because of the civic powers which the vestries of the various churches had arrogated to themselves the money was thus collected. This method of collecting the money seems to have been not only satisfactory, but desired by the people of the parish, and the alternate method, that of selling the pews, was peti- tioned against in the assembly so that all would have equal rights in the house of worship, but the vestry did occasionally grant permission to various individuals to build pews in the chapel. Governor. Nicholson, Colonel Edward Moseley, and the Reverend John Garzia contributed the church silver, and the same Edward Moseley contributed a library of seventy- four volumes to the church. Like many of the Virginia churches, it fell into some neglect at the time of the Revolu- tion, partly because of the disestablishment of the church, and partly because the parishioners were too far from the 76 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES building to take a very active interest in it, and in 1819 it was restored as we learn from an inscription at the base of the chancel window: In honour of God, to the memory of Josiah Collins by whose efforts mainly this church when in ruins was restored. Died May 19th, 1819 St. Michael’s, at Charleston, South Carolina, is perhaps most famous of all the Southern churches, although it is by no means as old as St. Luke’s in Smithfield, nor was its early history as interesting as that of the Bruton Church, but it has been fortunate in that Charleston has from its foundation steadily been a city of commercial importance as well as a stage of famous historical events. It was begun in 1752, the South Carolina Gazette of February 22nd of that year informing its readers, “The church will be built on one of Mr. Gibson’s designs, and it is thought will exhibit a fine piece of architect- ure when completed.” It is elsewhere recorded that the plans were brought from England, and as there is no record of any English architect of that day named Gibson, and as James Gibbs was then at the height of his reputation, the late Mont-. gomery Schuyler has suggested that James Gibbs was the archi- tect, an assumption which is borne out by the design of the VA. ALEXANDRIA, CHRIST CHURCH, VINIOWIA ‘VINGNVXAIV ‘HOUNHO LSTaHO SHOIMALNI SS = ——— Se EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES rt _ building itself, which, with reasonable allowance for the differ- ence in materials, resembles quite closely some of the English churches designed by this architect. The building is con- structed entirely of brick covered with stucco, and is indeed a fine piece of architecture when completed, although to the eye accustomed to the lighter and slenderer proportions of the New England churches it at first sight appears a trifle heavy. At the time of its construction it was the finest church edifice in the United States, and is one of the very few entirely of masonry, including the tower as far as the belfry. The length of the building with the portico was one hundred and thirty feet, and its width sixty feet, while the tower is one hundred and sixty-eight feet high. The roof is of slate, and the belfry of wood, while the spire and the gilt ball surmount- ing it are of black cypress covered with copper. Many years ago, during a severe storm, this ball was blown from the steeple and made a dent in the heavy pavement without injuring the ball itself, which was picked up and restored to its-original position. As was the case with many of the Episcopal churches in America, it was more or less a governmental affair, and, like King’s Chapel in Boston, the cornerstone was laid by the Governor of the state, this taking place on February 18, 1752, three years after the New England church was begun. The church was opened for services on February 16, 1761, nine years after it had been commenced, part of the delay having 78 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES . been caused by the difficulty in selecting a satisfactory rector. The clock and chimes were bought in 1764; the communion service was given to the church by Governor Bull of South Carolina, and the organ was bought by subscription in 1768. Like almost all the Colonial churches, this one suffered vicis- situdes during the Revolutionary War; its rector was a Tory and was compelled to resign, leaving church affairs in a some- what chaotic condition. Materially, it suffered through the loss of its leaden roof, which was melted up to furnish bullets for the Colonial rifles. Again, during the Civil War, the building suffered: it was several times struck by shells from the Union fleet, and the bells and organ having been removed to Columbia for safekeeping, the bells were wantonly broken up by Sherman’s army on its march to the sea. After the war they were recast by the English firm that had made them a hundred years before, and, with the organ, were restored to their original position, where they still remain. The church has suffered not only during two wars, but a cyclone in 1825 wrecked the spire and damaged the roof, and on August 31, 1886, the great Charleston earthquake cracked the walls in many places, sunk the spire eight inches, and tilted it out of perpendicular, and $15,000 was expended before the damage was repaired. The church at one time caught fire, and this incident was made the subject of a poem which thirty years ago used to be a favorite in school speak- ing contests, for the fire was extinguished by a slave at great POHICK CHURCH, NEAR ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA ‘VA SVIMGNVXA1V UVAN ‘HOUNHD MOIHOd ‘MOTUALNI Wo SS ASS ~~ SSS Sacieass EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 79 risk to his own life, and freedom was granted to him as a re- ward for his daring. The parish was founded in 1751 by a division of the first parish of St. Philip’s, and the act which authorized the new parish also authorized the construction of the new church at the cost of not more than £17,000 proclamation money. Proclamation money was paper money whose value had been fixed by proclamation at about £133 to £100 sterling, but the actual cost of the building was less than $40,000, a very large sum in those days, and measured by the cost of labor to-day an infinitely greater one. The bill for the entertainment of the Governor and his staff when they laid the cornerstone has been preserved; the dinner cost twenty pounds, toddy, punch, beer, and wine cost forty-five pounds five shillings, and broken glass five shillings more. The traditional hospitality of Charleston seems to have been vindicated even at that early day. The beautiful wrought-iron gates are said to be by A. Iusti, who, with Diedrick Werner, a German, was respon- sible for most of the most artistic ironwork of the city. The interior of the building is extremely well designed, with magnifi- cent candelabra, a very beautiful pulpit, and an agreeable reredos and galleries; the treatment of the ceiling is some- what heavier than we should like to see in plaster, and extends over the full width of the church, instead of being supported over the galleries as was the custom in most of the northern churches. The old-fashioned pews are still retained, but 80 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES platforms have been built in most of them (there are ninety- three in all) so that the congregation might be enabled to see over the tops. Of the exterior nothing need be said, and taking the building as a whole, it ranks very high among our American church structures, not only of Colonial times, but in the early history of America. Christ Church, at Alexandria, Virginia, and Pohick Church, not far from Alexandria, should occupy a peculiar place in American church history, since with their history is associated that of very great men, none of whose lives touched those of the churches more closely than that of George Washington; a vestryman of both of them, and the reputed designer of Pohick. The two churches resemble each other very closely, except that Christ Church has a tower and Pohick has none; both of them stand in what was the original parish of Truro; the Pohick congregation was the original one of that part of the parish, and was the church of the Mount Vernon household. The first of the Washingtons intimately connected with the church was Augustine, and it was he who nominated the first lay leader. From that time on the family took a promi- nent part in the affairs of the church; on the 25th of October, 1752, George Washington and George William Fairfax were appointed church wardens for the ensuing year. The original church structure was a frame one, erected before 1732; but this became inadequate, and in October, 1764, Truro parish was divided between the Pohick Church and the congregation THE HOME MORAVIAN CHURCH, WINSTON-SALEM, N. C. ‘O °N ‘WHIVS-NOLSNIM ‘HOUNHS NVIAVUOW AWOH AHL SYOMaLNI WV 4, | 1 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 81 now known as Christ Church, Alexandria, George Washington becoming a vestryman in both parishes. One question which has vexed the ecclesiastical antiquaries is settled by the ac- counts of Pohick Church, and this is as to whether surplices were or were not worn in pre-Revolutionary days; the accounts of Pohick Church show that surplices were bought in 1756. Alexandria was at that day quite a prosperous litile town, and in 1765, after the division of the parish, it was determined to build a new church, or rather two churches, one at Falls Church and the other at Alexandria. The architect selected was one James Wren, reputed to be a descendant of Sir Chris- topher Wren, and the contract was given to James Parsons, a builder, for the sum of six hundred pounds sterling. The church was built of brick and roofed with juniper shingles, the ..order used in the decoration of the pulpit and the tables for the Commandments and the Creed being Ionic, from which the volutes have now been lost ; the remainder of the building is supposed to have been designed in the Tuscan style. The gallery in the interior was added about 1800, and the spire somewhat later, and the original appearance of the church was practically that of the Pohick Church. It seems that even in those days contractors were not without their difficulties, for the building, begun long before, in 1772 was not completed, and the original contractor declined to proceed with the work. Colonel John Carlisle then agreed to complete the work for the additional amount of two hundred and twenty pounds, and the 82 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES church was finished and dedicated on February 27, 1773. The pews were then sold to the members of the church, George Washington paying thirty-six pounds ten shillings for his, which, by the way, remains the only pew in the church in its original condition, the other old square pews having been cut up into the present-day or “slip” type. Pohick Church was started four years after the Alexandria Church and completed at about the same date. At the time of the erection of this new building there was some discussion as to whether the old site should be reoccupied, or whether a new site should be chosen, since many people wished to pre- “serve the old site, especially since it was surrounded by a churchyard in which the dead of the parish had been for long buried. When this discussion arose Washington at once took a survey of the parish and made a map, marking thereon the residences of the parishioners; the church was accordingly placed at the centre of population. The construction of the new church was placed in the hands of a building committee of five, which contains four very distinguished names: George Washington, George William Fairfax, Daniel McCarty, and Edward Payne. The wily Mr. Washington saved the archi- tect’s commission by making the drawings himself, and it is reported they were drawn on white paper with India ink; tracing cloth was, of course, in those days unknown. This building, although somewhat smaller than the Alexandria Church, was of very similar design, and it is probable that EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 83 Washington as a vestryman of both churches had access to the plans of Christ Church, and copied them with the neces- sary reductions in size. The contractor was one Daniel ’ French, whose contract was for the amount of £887. The specifications were known as “terms of agreement,” and the contractor was then known as the “undertaker’’ — pos- sibly terms of disagreement might better define specifica- tions, although the contractor’s former title might unhappily often be employed to-day with truth. From the time of com- pletion the history of the two churches. was sadly unlike: Christ Church continued to grow in wealth and in physical condition, while Pohick Church was much neglected, and in 1837 was in a very bad state of repair. During the Civil War ‘the military invaders carried off at their pleasure any of its interior woodwork for private purposes, and all that remained of the original woodwork at the close of the Civil War was the cornice around the ceiling.” From the conclusion of the Civil War until 1874 no services were held there, but at the latter date a wealthy New Yorker collected sufficient money from New York and Philadelphia to put the church in good condi- tion, although no true restoration was attempted. Besides the Revolutionary worthies who attended these two churches were many of the prominent Southerners who figured in the War of the Rebellion, among them that great leader whose career, except as to its success, was so singularly like that of Washing- ton: General Robert E. Lee. 84 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES These two churches, Christ Church built in 1765, and Pohick Church in 1769, were the two with which President Washington was most closely associated, but if the records of the churches erected previous to the American Revolution, or even subsequent to his death, are to be believed, he was a gentleman who never missed a chance to attend divine service, and unless he-was an invited guest in many of the churches ‘the rents of the pews he occupied must have amounted to a staggering figure. It is rather a rare thing to read of any Colo- nial church George Washington at any time passed without becoming a regular attendant, at least in the church traditions, and the plates indicating the pews in which General Washing- ton sat would be almost sufficient to have run a well-equipped brass foundry for a number of years. The Congregational and Unitarian churches of Boston, as well as King’s Chapel, claim him for an attendant, the Dutch Reformed churches in New Jersey likewise; he occupied a pew in St. Paul’s Chapel and also one in Trinity Church in New York, besides Christ Church in Alexandria and the Pohick Meeting House; several other Virginia churches have records of his attendance; St. -Peter’s and Christ Church in Philadelphia number him among their parishioners; and even Presbyterian Princeton records him as having been an attendant at the college chapel. His was a record of church attendance which has probably never been surpassed, and, while it has become more or less a joke to the writer to find how regularly George Washington’s THE FIRST REFORMED CHURCH, HACKENSACK, N. J. ‘[ ¢N SHOVSNANOVH ‘HOUNHS GCAWUOATU Lsuls SS aS SS = EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 85 name occurs in the records of every early parish, there is after all something very fine in the religious feeling of this busy man of affairs who could and did spare time to attend divine wor- ship in whatever church he happened to be near, regardless of its sectarian affiliations or its humble condition. There is something very fine, too, about the devotion and loyalty of the American people to his memory, so that his mere passage through an old building has somewhat sanctified and con- secrated it, and is forever remembered when a constant attend- ance and’enormous gifts of lesser men have been forgotten. CHAPTER V CHURCHES OF THE MIDDLE STATES DURING THE EIGH- TEENTH CENTURY HE churches of the Middle States illustrated in this chapter can be divided as to their design into two classes: those built in New Jersey and those built in New York and Pennsylvania. The New Jersey churches were distinctly different in character from those of the neighboring states, probably because New Jersey was at that time a rural community without urban centres like New York and Phila- delphia, where wealth and education brought a desire for more elegant and expensive structures than could be expected in the farming towns of the smaller state. Probably, too, the racial characteristics of the settlers in New Jersey differen- tiated the architecture from that common to New York and Pennsylvania, these two states being predominantly English, while in New Jersey the older communities at least were chiefly Dutch. There is another point to be considered in dis- cussing this difference: only the finest of the old buildings in New York and Philadelphia have been preserved, and there were several old buildings in those cities which were not at all dis- similar from such New Jersey churches as the First Reformed Church at Hackensack and the First Presbyterian Church at 86 Senha TEE CHRIST CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA, PA. - ‘Wd SVIHdTSACVIIHd ‘HOUNHO LSIMHO ‘UOrMaLNI RAAT N N cos EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 87 Newark, but they have been long since pulled down and de- stroyed. The settlers in the Middle States did not take their religion as hard as the New Englanders or Virginians did, and the history of all the churches is therefore comparatively free from records of persecution. Pennsylvania was, of course, settled by the Quaker colony under William Penn, and while the Quakers seem to have been extremely obstreperous and nuisancy when they were the under dogs, they were kind- hearted and good-natured when they held the upper hand, so there seems to have been no objection raised to the founda- tion of Episcopal parishes in Philadelphia, nor to the erection of Lutheran churches in adjoining settlements. In New Jersey, or at least within the limits of the old colony of East Jersey, the Dutch settlers had settled and founded their churches before the English came into control, and were never disturbed by the English government in the peaceful conduct of their religious affairs. The same thing was true of the upper part of New York State; and New York City, even during the eighteenth century, was the most cosmopolitan and tolerant of all the American cities, and, except in its very early days, all the sects worked together with a spirit of Chris- tian fellowship unusual before the nineteenth century. In fact, in most communities from which the New England Puri- tan element was absent there seems to have been little dis- cord. In the early days New England was more cordially 88 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES disliked by the Middle States than even old England; and after the Revolution the inhabitants of the Middle States felt that they had borne the principal burdens of a war begun in New England, which chiefly advantaged New England, although after the first year practically none of the fighting was done in New England, and the proportion of troops fur- nished by it was disproportionately small in comparison with its population. But as Mr. Harold Frederick has said in one of his books, it was New England that furnished the historians who wrote of the war, so the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord have been made more familiar to us than the Battle of Saratoga, which the English historian, Creasy, has given as one of the world’s fifteen decisive battles. The oldest existing church buildings in the Middle States are undoubtedly those of the Dutch Reformed Church in Ber- gen and Monmouth counties, New Jersey, excepting, possibly, some of the Quaker meeting houses. None of these has been illustrated, since they possess nothing distinctly ecclesiastical in their architecture, resembling rather large barns or cot- tages, and since the Quaker policy was one of abstention from political and military affairs, few men of historical importance were members of the different meetings. Probably the oldest remaining church building in the Middle States is, nevertheless, the Quaker Meeting House at Flushing, Long Island, said to have been built in 1665, and certainly dating from the seven- teenth century. One or two other meeting houses in southern TENNENT CHURCH, NEAR FREEHOLD, N. Je ‘f -N ‘@IOHaaua UVEN ‘HOUNHO LNANNGL 40 UOMaLNI EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 89 New Jersey, and one or two near Philadelphia, also date from the end of the seventeenth or the beginning of the eighteenth century, but aside from their age have no reason to be in- cluded in this compilation. St. David’s Church, at Radnor, Pennsylvania, is in design typical of this earlier work. Built in 1715, of stone, it differs in no important detail of the exterior from the small stone farmhouses which once existed in such profusion around Philadelphia, and though it is a quaint and interesting little structure, it has so little of the ecclesiastical character as to make it hardly worth illustrating. The same thing is true of the earliest of the Dutch Reformed churches: that at Oakland built before 1700, its neighbor at Wyckoff built in the early eighteenth century, and others at Bergen Field, Ridgefield, Hohokus, and other places, are of so uniform and uninteresting a character that the best of them, the Hackensack Church, will serve to illustrate them all. Most of them were built of local red sandstone, and they were plain, gabled structures with a stone tower at one end sur- mounted with an octagonal spire, or perhaps a lantern, and for some unexplained reason they lack entirely the grace and charm of the Dutch country houses. They have one char- acteristic, however, which is surprising when one considers the fact that they were all of them built toward the end of the Renaissance period, the traditional pointed Gothic windows were generally used with brick coigns around the windows 90 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES and sometimes with brick tracery, although the decorative features of the churches were of a simple, Classic type, and not very well-designed Classic at that. The congregation of the Hackensack Church was organized as early as 1686, and the first building erected on the present site was constructed in 1696; it was a substantial stone struc- ture, and when it was rebuilt, in 1726, some of the stone from the old building was incorporated into the new. Since 1726 the building has been enlarged or altered three times, in 1791, 1837, and 1867, but care was taken each time not to deviate from the original scheme, and there has been no substantial change in the style of the structure since its erection. In the interior there have been inevitably some changes; it is quite probable that the gallery was not part of the original scheme, and the iron columns were only inserted in 1867, taking the place of older wooden columns; the ceiling has probably always been of the rather curious form shown in the illustration, but this is not certain; the pews, of course, were originally square pews. This church at Hackensack unquestionably had great in- fluence on the design of ecclesiastical structures in its neigh- borhood, since it calls itself the “Mother” of sixteen other churches, fifteen of which, constructed before 1814, resemble. in the main the parent church. Unfortunately the name of the designer is not known, and probably it had no designer in the real sense of the word, but was built from simple draw- ings made by the masons and carpenters who constructed it, foe ee Se he om * “a et ee ee BN De su bn OR = BS Se os wo me ONE ST. PAUL'S CHAPEL, NEW YORK CITY MUYOA MAN “TAdVHO S,1NVd *LS WOMMTLINI 4 ee nd EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 91 and of a size indicated by its congregation as necessary. This was a usual method of procedure throughout the colonies for domestic as well as for ecclesiastical structures. Christ Church in Philadelphia, which was erected only a year after the Hackensack Church, is a very different sort of build- ing; it is.one of the handsomest of all the Colonial buildings, and perhaps the most interesting of them all architecturally, notable as one of the few in which the body of the building was not neglected by the designer in favor of the tower and the interior. The designer is said to have been Dr. John Kearsley, an amateur architect, although a physician by pro- ‘fession. He was certainly the designer of St. Bartholomew’s . and St. John’s churches in Philadelphia, and has sometimes said to have been the architect of Independence Hall, al- though it is probable that Andrew Hamilton was its architect, working under a committee on which Dr. Kearsley served. The building was begun in 1727, and was completed in 1737, and the design in a general way resembles that of St. Martin’s- in-the-Fields, London, although the difference in the material has changed its apparent character from that of the English church. In 1754 a chime of bells was purchased in England, the money having been raised for this purpose through a lot- tery run by Benjamin Franklin, and as there was only one other set of chimes in the colonies at the time that these were erected, the interest of the citizens of Philadelphia in ‘them was very great, and they were rung daily at noon and in the evenings 92 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES of market days to please the Philadelphians. Christ Church, although a good Church of England body, was of an extremely independent spirit, and after the Declaration of Independence had been signed, the bust of George III was removed from the church, and when the crown on the spire of the church was destroyed by lightning a few months later, it was considered of good import by the congregation. On July 20th, in 1775, the Continental Congress attended in a body its services, and during the years of the presidency of General Washington he was a pewholder in this church, although his ‘pew: is no longer in the building, but is preserved in the National Mu- seum at Washington. Betsy Ross was another well-known parishioner. Like ‘many of the old Episcopal churches, its — furniture, silver, etc., possesses much historical interest, and perhaps the most valuable of all its possessions is an original copy of the prayer-book of Edward VI with notations of - the changes made when the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States was organized from the old Church of Eng- land; the convention which affected this organization was held in this building in 1785. The exterior of the building almost perfectly expresses its interior; the existence of galleries being amply indicated by the superimposed order of the ex- terior, and the nave and side aisles are equally well expressed in the treatment of the facade here illustrated. While the interior remains much the same as it was when constructed, the building has been extended two or three times, and the SSS y ST. PETER’S CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA, Pa. ‘Vd ‘VIHATSAVTIHd ‘HOUNHS SAILAd “1S “HOTMALNI EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 93 half arch which terminates the arcade supporting the roof was necessitated at the time of the last of these extensions, since there was not room enough on the lot for another full bay, and the vestry desired a passage from the north to the south side of the church at its rear. A curious feature of the interior is the way that the galleries pass completely behind the pillars, apparently not being supported by them at all; this change, Mr. Brinton White says, was made in 1834 on the recommendation of Mr. Thomas M. Walter, an architect of reputation. These two details of the interior are things which would not probably be done were the building to be designed nowadays, yet the structure is of an excellence not surpassed by any of the modern Classical churches, and by few even of the famous English ones. St. George’s Church, at Schenectady, is one of the old New York churches which possesses a certain amount of historic interest, but which has been so fully and unhappily “re- stored” as to destroy its value architecturally. Founded as a mission to the Six Nations under Queen Anne, it gradually became a regular parish, the present building having been constructed in 1748, and was the parochial church of Sir Wil- liam Johnson, the famous intendant of Indian affairs. The Mohawk Valley is the site of another old church which deserves a passing mention: the old Palatine Church, built in 1770. The Palatine settlers in the valley were during the Revolutionary War most determined opponents of the Tory 94 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES sons of Sir William Johnson, and it was against them that the terrible forays led by the Johnsons and Walter Butler were directed. One of its parishioners was the Continental General Herkimer, killed at Oriskany; and the church building itself was injured by marauding parties. It differs from all the other early churches in having a gambrel, or “Dutch” roof, but is of small size and little architectural interest. The Tennent Church is the oldest Presbyterian church in the United States; the congregation was formed by Scotch Covenanters in 1692, who built a rude meeting house about five miles north of the present site; this served until 1731, when the present building was erected. Its corporate title is “The First Presbyterian Church of the County of Mon- mouth,” but during its early history it was known as “The Scots Church,” later taking its name from its most famous pastor, the Reverend William Tennent, an Irish immigrant to America in 1730. In 1751 the church was enlarged and repaired, although both the plan and exterior remain substan- tially in accordance with the original scheme, and although the building is of wood painted white, it is to-day in excellent condition with no changes of importance from the traditional form. Historically, its chief claim to fame is the fact that it was used as headquarters by General Washington at the Battle of Monmouth, and in the great graveyard which sur- rounds it are buried many soldiers of both armies, including the English Colonel Monckton. Although it has no archi- EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 95 tectural pretensions, it is not without a certain quaint attrac- tiveness, due perhaps as much to its happy situation among great trees, and to its color, the traditional white and green of Colonial architecture, as to any particular feature of its de- sign. It is the oldest of many similar structures built by the poorer congregations around New York, and its inclusion has been thought fitting for this reason, as well as because it is the earliest existing Presbyterian church. The old prints and drawings of the city of New York show a multitude of churches, some of which, judging from these rather crudely executed works, must have been of great in- terest, although probably none of them were better designed than St. Paul’s, the oldest chapel of Trinity Church; this was the only church chartered in ‘the city of New York, and all the older Episcopal congregations in the city are either still chapels of Trinity Church, or had their beginnings as chapels. The first structure of the Protestant Episcopal Church in New York was a small chapel within the fort erected by the English when they took possession of Man- hattan Island, and was called King’s Chapel. The first building of Trinity parish was completed in 1697, enlarged in 1737, and burned in 1776. In 1778 a new church of less size was constructed, and the present Trinity Church was built in 1841. This is, of course, the well-known Gothic build- ing designed by Upjohn, which is excluded from illustration because of its style and the late date of its erection. 96 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES St. Paul’s Chapel is, however, the original structure, of which the cornerstone was laid in 1756; it is said to have been designed by a Scotch architect named Macbean, although there is a tradition to the effect that its tower and the portico, perhaps its best features, are the work of an unknown French draughtsman. While this story may have some truth, it hardly seems probable, since the proportions of both the spire and the portico are much more slender than the French work of the period of Louis XV, and are austere rather than florid. They are also so completely in harmony, both with the body of the exterior and with the exquisite interior, that there.seems little doubt that they were designed at the same time, although perhaps not executed until later. Historically, the building is second only to Trinity Church in importance; its portico con- tains a memorial to General Montgomery, a former parish- ioner, who was killed at the siege of Quebec, and whose body was, by permission of the British authorities, disinterred from its Canadian grave and reinterred in St. Paul’s Chapel. The monument itself had a disturbed time in getting to the United States; it was made in France at the order of the ubiquitous Benjamin Franklin, was brought over in an American priva- teer, captured by an English gunboat, and eventually reached its destination. During the days of the British occupancy of New York this was the church of the British officers, and Lord Howe, Major André, and Sir Guy Carleton worshipped here, and pews “HOLY TRINITY,’ LANCASTER, PA. ore ot, ‘Vd SMALSVONVT SALINIGL ATOH AHL JO HOUNHD AHL AO YOIUALNI EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 97 occupied by General Washington and General Clinton are still preserved, and indicated by tablets set in the adjacent walls. General Washington, that inveterate churchgoer, at- tended the ceremonial services here on the day of his in- auguration. An excellent old organ which was played at the ceremonial service was afterward sold to St. Michael’s at Marblehead, and the present one was installed. St. Peter’s Church, Philadelphia, occupied a similar rela- tionship to Christ Church that St. Paul’s did to Trinity Church in New York. It was originally a chapel of Christ Church, but in 1832 became an independent congregation. It was erected on land given by two sons of William Penn, who were members of the Church of England, although their father was so distinguished a Quaker. Its construction was made necessary by the overcrowding of Christ Church, and in 1758 the vestry records show that, “It is unanimously agreed that the taking and collecting the subscriptions and conducting the affairs relating to the building and furnishing the said in- tended church shall be under the management of the minister, a3 church wardens, and vestry of Christ Church.” The name of the architect is not certainly known, but he was probably one Samuel Rhodes. Its construction occupied the three years from 1758 to 1761; the tower and spire were not part of the original design, and were only added in 1842 from drawings made by Mr. William Strickland, a distinguished architect of the early nineteenth century. Before the construction of the 98 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES present spire, the lower part of the tower was topped with a cupola containing two small bells, but when a full chime was presented to the church, the congregation desired some place to put them, and finding that an extension of the tower was necessary, it determined that it should be in the form of a spire. The building is sixty by ninety feet, unusually large for a church of that day, and has a curious and unexpected plan, the pulpit being placed at one end of the building backing up against the tower, while the reredos is at the opposite end in front of the triple window shown in the photograph of the exterior. It has no principal entrance, but at each corner two small doors on the adjoining sides lead to a vestibule, through which one reaches the body of the church. The building is by no means so pretentious as Christ Church, but possesses very strongly the most charming features of the Colonial work in the de- lightful proportions of the window openings and the placing of the white notes against the red brick of the body. of the building. Holy Trinity, at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is one of the oldest and most beautiful of the Lutheran churches, and shows very distinctly the influence of the Philadelphia churches. The first settlement by Lutherans, in what is known as Lancaster County, was made in about 1710, and in 1729 this congrega- tion was organized, the first church building, erected in 1734, being a small stone structure with a steeple and bells. The congregation was German, but the church organization (as was ST. PAUL’S CHURCH, EAST CHESTER, N. Y. rt THE FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, NEWARK, N. J. EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 99 the case in the early days) was dependent more or less upon Sweden, since Sweden was the only country in which the State Church was the Evangelical Lutheran. The old building be- coming too small for the congregation, on May 18, 1761, the cornerstone of the present church was laid, and although the names of the vestry and the deacons and the pastor and the provost were enclosed in the cornerstone, the name of the architect was not, and the official church history is silent about him. In 1766 the church was consecrated, and in 1768 a bell was cast in London that still hangs in the steeple. The organ, which at the time of the Revolutionary War was the largest in America, was built in 1771, and in 1777, when Congress was expelled from Philadelphia and took refuge in Lancaster, some of its members worshipped in the church. The tower was built in 1785-86, and in 1787 Franklin College was incorpo- rated, and the cornerstone laid, Benjamin Franklin being among those present. The first president of this college was Dr. H. E. Muhlenberg, celebrated as a naturalist, who was at that time pastor of Trinity Church. Since Lancaster was until 1812 the capital of the State of Pennsylvania, a number of distinguished worthies of Colonial days were worshippers at Trinity, and Thomas Wharton, president of the Supreme Executive Council, was buried in the church grounds in 1778, and Thomas Mifflin, the first Governor of the state, was buried there in 1800. The church history has been uneventful and prosperous for the two centuries which have elapsed since the 100 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES first settlers gathered. The church building has been repaired and repainted from time to time, but the records show no evidence of extensive alteration other than the construction of the tower as previously noted. One of the most interesting small churches still in existence in the United States is St. Paul’s at East Chester, near Mount Vernon, New York. The first church building at this town was erected in 1692, and the permission of the Governor of the province was asked for the installation of a rector. It was refused, and the congregation appealed to the Assembly for permission to separate from the parish, of which till then they had formed a part. This was granted, but by order of the Bishop of London, confirmed by Queen Anne, it was rescinded, and the church was continued as a chapel until 1795. The pres- ent building was begun in 1764, and completed in 1776; and the storms of war at once broke over the new building. It was used as a hospital by the British, who destroyed part of it. Its congregation was much scattered, and it was years after the war before it again became a strong organization. The First Presbyterian Church in Newark is the oldest Presbyterian congregation in the state, the members of the congregation being New Englanders from Branford, Connec- ticut, who had become unwelcome in their native town be- cause of their Presbyterian leanings. The first minister was Abram Pierson, a Scotchman, and the first of three succes- sive church edifices for this congregation was constructed in ‘f-°N SHUVMaN ‘HOWNHO NVIMXZLAGSAUd LSuld YOMMALNI MEETING HOUSE, SPRINGFIELD, N. J. EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 101 1663-65. The original building was a stockaded fort prepared for defence against Indian attacks, and lasted until 17 15, when a substantial stone structure was erected; this was occupied until the present building was constructed in 1787. As is not unusual in early American churches, there seems to be consider- able doubt as to the exact date of the structure, “The Geor- gian Period” giving it as 1774, and other documents as 1746, or 1791. The church history has been quiet and uneventful, but it has the distinction of having given the first president ' to Yale University, the Reverend Abram Pierson, Jr.; its second pastor, and its seventh pastor, Aaron Burr, was the president of Princeton University, or, as it was then called, the College of New Jersey. The College of New Jersey was in fact organized within the walls of the second structure built for this congregation, by members of the Presbyterian Synod of New Jersey who desired a place of higher education with suitable religious influence, and Princeton was for many years rather strongly Presbyterian in its government and student body, although it has never discriminated either for or against any particular creed. The official church history has nothing to say of its architect. Very similar to the Newark church is the Presbyterian Church at Elizabeth, New Jersey, built in 1789, of similar stone, with brick coigns around the openings, and a tall, slim wooden spire. Another Presbyterian Church illustrated in this chapter 102 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES is that in Springfield, New Jersey, situated not very far from the Newark church, but constructed of wood, of simple design, and resembling more nearly the Tennent Church than that at Newark. It is probably as nearly typical of the country meeting houses of late Colonial times as any building could be, and aside from the belfry there is nothing to distinguish it from a big storehouse or dwelling house of the period. But like many of the Colonial buildings, in spite of its extreme simplicity it is possessed of considerable charm, because of the excellent proportions of the cornice to the mass which it surmounts, the pleasing texture of the surfaces, and the feeling of scale due to the distribution and division of the window openings. The original church at Springfield was built in 1761, and was burned on June 20, 1780, during the battle of Springfield. It had been previously used by the Colonial government as a storehouse for supplies for the Continental army, necessitating the utilization of a neighboring barn for services; the present structure was rebuilt on the old founda- tion, and was opened for worship on November 20, 1791. The exterior is of hand-split shingles, and as was the case with all buildings of that period, the ironwork, even to the nails, was hand-made. The interior was done over about 1880, when the small iron columns supporting the balcony were substituted for the older ones, and the stencil patterns were applied to the walls. The statue in front of the church rep- resents a Continental soldier, and was erected in memory DUTVTTN TONE N TT BULL Esa 202 ‘i aa LH Lar aah Wut na HLL INTERIOR, THE MEETING HOUSE, SPRINGFIELD, NEW JERSEY 7 Oe) ST. MARK’S CHURCH, NEW YORK CITY EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 103 of the skirmish fought there, during which the church was held by Continental troops and attacked by the British, while the Reverend Mr. Caldwell, the pastor of the church, although not actively engaged in the fight, tore up the Watts hymn books for wadding, and threw them to the soldiers, crying out, “Give them Watts, boys; put Watts into them.” The latest of the churches in this chapter is St. Mark’s-in- the-Bouwerie, New York City. Again the church records are silent as to the architect, although the contract for the carpenter work was made with one C. Halstead, and that for mason work with Messrs. Pers & McComb. There is just a bare possibility that this McComb was the architect-builder who was the reputed designer of the City Hall and St. John’s Chapel, but this is only a guess. The present building was begun in 1795 and completed about 1799, but while the body of the building remains as it was then, the appearance was very different, since neither the tower nor the porch was part of the original scheme, and it is these two things which give the character to the structure. On December 7, 1826, the plans of Messrs. Thomson & Town for a steeple were ac- cepted, Town being probably Ithiel Town, who was the ar- chitect also of the Centre Church at New Haven, and was the most distinguished architect of his time. The present porch across the front of the building was added in 1836. The original interior had large square columns in place of the curious iron ones now in the building, and as the congre- 104 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES gation objected to these, because they obstructed the view of the altar, they were removed and the present ones inserted; otherwise the interior remains about as it was at the beginning. The ground on which the church stands was originally part of the country estate of Peter Stuyvesant, who built a small chapel on it for the accommodation of his own house- hold and the settlement which grew around it, known as the Bouwerie. After his death in 1682 he was buried in a vault below the chapel. His widow, who died in 1686, left the chapel to the Dutch Reformed Church of New York to dispose of as it saw fit, provided the vault was retained. The Stuy- vesant family later joined the English Church, and Petrus Stuy- vesant, Peter’s great-grandson, and a vestryman of Trinity for some years, proposed to the vestry of Trinity Church the erection of a building upon his land, toward which he offered to give £800 and a plot of ground 150 x 190 ft. The vestry of Trinity appropriated the sum of £5,000 in addition, and fur- ther sums were raised by selling five-year leases of the pews at auction, pew No. 9 being presented to Mr. Stuyvesant rent free for five years in recognition of his liberality; pew No. 108 was reserved for “the Governor and other respectable char- acters who may occasionally attend divine service in the church.” Among the other pewholders were Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Fish, General Horatio Gates, Francis Bayard Winthrop, and John Slidell, and besides these men the roster of the congregation has included at least one representative of EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 105 probably all the most distinguished old families of New York. After the church was completed it was transferred by Trinity parish to a separate church organization, this being the first independent Episcopal Church in New York. In spite of the fact that a very great many wealthy and distinguished people have been members of the congregation, the church organiza- tion has never been extremely prosperous; the location of the church has long been far from the centre of the residential district, and its existence to-day is due to the affection with which the congregation regard the place of burial of so many of their distinguished ancestors. 'The memorials in the church record the names of some of these, of whom certainly the most distinguished is, as we learn from the tablet erected to his memory: PETRUS STUYVESANT late Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of Amsterdam in New Netherland, now called New York, and the Dutch West India Islands, died in A. D. 1681/2 aged 80 years. CHAPTER VI CONNECTICUT CHURCHES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY E have, of course, from the nineteenth century a very great multitude of church buildings, and in the selection of examples for illustration we are troubled, not with the dearth of material, but with the necessity of es- tablishing a rational dividing line between the churches which should be included and those which need not be touched upon. As is indicated in the introductory chapter, the churches in- cluded have been chosen partially for their historic interest, but principally because they were inheritors and continuers of the Colonial traditions, and were not inspired by the Greek Re- vival of the early portion of the nineteenth century. Even so, we might include several excellently designed structures in each portion of the country which have not been illustrated because they were merely duplications of other buildings which are illustrated, and were without historical associations of more than local importance. The traditional style of the late eighteenth century was continued in the early portion of the nineteenth, and, as might be expected, persists much longer in the remote and outlying districts than it does in metropolitan centres, where the new- 106 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 107 fashioned architecture was first developed. In 1806 the Greek Revival had made little progress outside of the large cities, and even there was exhibiting small influence on design, so the First Church of Christ, Hartford, Connecticut, which was begun on March 6, 1806, is distinctly a more ornate example of the eighteenth century type, rather than the beginning of a new style. It is said to have been designed by Mr. Daniel Wadsworth, a citizen of Hartford, so wealthy that he was nicknamed the “‘Meecenas” of the town, and the influence of his wealth seems to have been reflected in the multiplicity of ornament which decorated the tower and the interior. The plan is very simple, consisting of a nave, with aisles under gal- leries, the nave covered with a coffered barrel vault supported on very slender Ionic columns; the interior is so admirably proportioned that it is of unusual charm. The tower, while elaborate, is not of superlative excellence; the transition from the square to the octagonal is not happily made, and the fre- quency with which the tower is broken up by cornices does not add to its quietude and dignity. The congregation is one of the earliest in Connecticut, having been established in 1635 by settlers from Newtown, Massachusetts, who ousted a Dutch settlement made two years previously. The first church building erected by the congregation was in use for only a few years, until 1640-41, when it was given by the town to Mr. Hooker for a barn, and a new structure was built, which was occupied for nearly one hundred years. In 1737 the 108 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES General Assembly of the colony of Connecticut determined upon the location of a new meeting house, which was built from plans made by Cotton Palmer of Warwick, Rhode Island, and this church building existed until the one still standing was erected. The exterior is completely in its original form, and the interior has been changed in only minor respects, the galleries and pulpit having been lowered; in 1852 the square pews were removed and replaced by slips. The church history has been quiet and uneventful, the neighborhood having been comparatively free from political disturbances, and the congregation without men celebrated historically. Nevertheless it was to this congregation that one of the founders of the colony, the Reverend Thomas Hooker, stated in a memorable sermon, “The foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people,” and this doctrine, then for the first time publicly declared in the United States, has never been better expressed. The Second Church of Christ at Hartford was built a little more than twenty years after the First, and is a remarkably close copy or adaptation of the earlier building, but not quite so interesting in design. These two churches are a pair of which any town could well be proud, but because of their separate locations and close duplication of design they do not form a combination nearly so interesting as the three churches on the green at New Haven. The grouping of these three churches is one of the earliest ALIO WHOA MIN SHOUNHS S MUVW “LS “YOIMALNI FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST, HARTFORD, CONN. ‘EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 109 examples of collective planning which exists in the United States, and remains certainly one of the most beautiful. The three buildings were erected at the same time: Centre Church was designed by Ithiel Town, and Trinity Church and the North Church were designed by David Hoadly, who super- intended the construction of all three, and the two men seem to have worked together in a spirit of harmony as unusual to-day as it was then. Trinity Church is, as its name denotes, Episcopalian, and is a pseudo-Gothic structure, not by any means as interesting as the other two, which are excellent examples of the Classic design of the period, and, in spite of its difference in style, harmonizes well with them, because its mass and the height of its spire correspond to those of the North Church, and both are dominated by the taller spire and greater size of the Centre Church. All three of the buildings were begun about 1812, and were finished in 1814-15, and through the courtesy of one of David Hoadly’s descendants, himself an architect, the writer has learned rather more about the designers of these structures than has usually been possible. Ithiel Town, who designed Centre Church, was the first architect resident in New Haven, going there from Hartford in 1810, and dying there in 1844. He was one of the most distinguished of our early designers, one of the promoters of the Greek Revival, and was responsible for a number of excellent early American structures, including the old State 110 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES House on the green, the Salisbury House on State Street, New Haven; Christ Church in Hartford, the old Merchants’ Exchange, afterward used as a customs house, in New York, and he was also consulting architect, if not the designer, of the state capitol at Raleigh, North Carolina, which remains to-day one of the most beautiful, and one of the best-planned, of our state capitols. His Centre Church was supposed to have been copied from St.-Martins-in-the-Fields at London, but as it was built of red brick with white-painted wooden ornamental parts, the effect was not very similar to that of the stone English building. In 1845 the entire structure was painted a dull lead color, seriously detracting from the ap- pearance of the building, and at this time also the interior of the church was extensively remodeled, a low dome being introduced, and possibly the reredos added. The framing of the wooden tower was very ingenious, each story being a separate structure running through the one below, down to the brickwork.. In 1912 the paint was removed from the brick and the woodwork repainted white, so that from the exterior the structure is again its original self, and is a very lovely piece of design. David Hoadly, the architect of the North Church ‘and of Trinity Church, was born in 1774 at Waterbury, Connecticut; he was either self-trained or learned from practical experience under architect-contractors with whom he worked on the Con- gregational Meeting House at Waterbury, built in 1792; the EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 111 Meeting House at Norfolk, Connecticut, and that at Milford, Connecticut. In 1814 he moved his family to New Haven, where, besides the churches already spoken of, he built the Tontine Hotel, the Sargent house, and several other houses, and was either the architect or assisted the architect of the old State House, now the City Hall, at Hartford. He died in July, 1839. An interesting memorial of his work was found when the Sargent house was destroyed to make room for the new library building. The following inscription was discovered on a tablet in the foundation walls: “I have caused this beautiful building to be erected for your use as well as for mine, & have taken much pains to accommodate you for which you will never pay, & being no relative of mine I demand that you assemble your friends together on every 26th day of May in honor of the independence of South America, it being on that day in the year 1810 that the inhabitants of Buenos Ayres established a free government. “Davin Hoapty, Architect, “L. Burier, Mason, “D. Rirrsr, Script.” It may be said in explanation of this curious inscription that Mr. Sargent was a good friend of Mr. Hoadly and had been the American Consul-General at Buenos Ayres when the Revolution occurred; the inscription is indicative of the very general interest taken in the United States in the rebellion ~ ‘112 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES ; against Spanish rule in South America, and the rejoicing over its success. It is also interesting to note that Hoadly signed himself “architect,” although it is probable that his function, as in the case of many of the other early American architects, included at least some of the duties now the contractor’s; and that he was very truly an architect in feeling as well as in ability is indicated by his feeling that the interest and love an archi- tect puts into his works, the “pains” as he calls it, cannot be repaid by mere money, but only by appreciation. The building of these three churches was difficult, since the lumber for them was obtained largely from the Connecticut River, down which it was floated in rafts and was then trans- ported by boat to New Haven. As this was in war time and there was a very strict blockade of the Sound, the progress of the buildings was considerably impeded, so much so, in fact, that the work at one time was stopped altogether. The archi- tect, Mr. Hoadly, applied to the Governor of Connecticut, requesting him to communicate with the commander of his Majesty’s fleet to permit the free transportation of the ma- terials for these churches. The following letter, addressed to Mr. John Kingsbury of Waterbury, from his brother, at this time Secretary of the State of Connecticut, will be of in- terest: New Lonpon, Conn., 19th July, 1814. Dear BRotTHER: , Your letter by Mr. Hoadly of Waterbury I received, since which a flag has been sent on board of one of His Majesty’s ‘NNOO ‘GYOALUVH SLSIMHD JO HOWNHO Lsuld AWL SAOIMALNI ip Ce ep RE a CONN. CENTER CHURCH, NEW HAVEN, EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 113 ships, and I have this day received an answer by a Flag from His Majesty’s ship Superb, with an open letter, addressed to His Excellency John Cotton Smith, which I shall forward to him immediately by mail. The contents of the open letter are as follows: “In compliance to your request in favor of the Wardens and Vestrymen of Trinity Church in New Haven, the ships under my orders will be directed not to molest any vessels that on examination prove to be literally engaged in conveying from the Connecticut the materials in question to New Haven for the purposes of erecting a church.” It will be most proper in my opinion for Mr. Hoadly to wait on His Excellency Governor Smith and receive from him a certified copy of the permit from Captain Paget. Give my love to your children and accept of this from your friend and brother, ' JAcoB KINGSBURY. John Kingsbury, Esq., Waterbury. The blockading fleet, by the way, was in command of Com- modore Hardy, the same Hardy who received Nelson’s dying words. The first congregation at New Haven was begun in 1637, when the town was founded, and the first house of worship (fifty feet square) was dedicated on April 18, 1638, and this early congregation is remarkable as being the first in which a union was formed between the Separatist element and ‘the Puritans of the Church of England, and the covenant was so ‘broad that church membership was conditioned only upon the acknowledgment of belief in Christianity. In 1670 a new building was begun which lasted until 1757, when the third 114 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES structure was built upon the original site, and endured until the present church was completed in 1814. The connection of Centre Church with Yale University has been close for many years, the graduating exercises having been held there for a very long time, and the graveyard around the old building contains the bodies of many of the pioneers of the city of New Haven, among them three of the so-called “regicides,” the judges who voted for the execution of Charles I. The church at Lyme is included in this volume on rather a doubtful basis, since the building of which the photograph was made is not an old structure, but as nearly a duplicate of the one which was burned in 1907 as the cleverness of the architect could make it. The elevations were drawn by work- ing back on the principles of perspective from the photographs of the old building, assisted by such data as could be got from the foundations, and from what scanty measurements remained. The building is illustrated in spite of this fact, because it is so nearly identical with the old that photographs made from the old and new buildings can easily be confused, and the loveliness of the building makes it seem worth while. The reconstruction was by Mr. Ernest Greene. The architect of the original building is not known, and Mr. Chapman of Lyme, the present rector, states “that there is a tradition that the plans were brought from London by one of the Lyme ship captains,” and adds: “Although I am well disposed toward such traditions, and would gladly prove their truth, I am ‘NNOO ‘NAaAVH MAN SHOWNHOD UALNAO “YOIMALNI THE NORTH CHURCH, NEW HAVEN, CONN. EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 115 forced to be skeptical with reference to this one, and am in- clined also to think that the tradition may have arisen from some book of instruction to master builders such as was cur- rent, I believe, in those days, and might well have been im- ported from England by one of the Lyme captains.” The contract for the construction of this church has been preserved, and in itself would seem to confute the theory that the plans were imported, and this contract is'of so much interest as shedding light on the methods of construction of that day that it is here copied in full: “THIS INDENTURE made & xeeutdt'h 23rd day of December, A.D. 1815, by & between Samuel Belcher of Elling- ton in the County of Tolland, and the first Ecclesiastical So- ciety of the town of Lyme, by their Committee, viz: Matthew Griswold, Joseph Noyes, William Noyes, Richard McCurdy, Nathaniel Matson, Israel Matson, Watrous Beckwith, Benja- min Coult, John Peck, Elisha Day, Diodat I.-Griswold, Enoch Lord, Exra Lee, John Highs, and David Wait. ‘“‘WirnessetH, That the said Belcher for the consideration herein after specified, Covenants & agrees with the said society, to build a Meeting House where said Committee shall direct, upon that Lot of land fixed by the County Court—Build the main body of said House 57 feet in length & 47 ft. in width, with 30 foot posts, and a Projection of Portico 5 ft. in length & 30 ft. in width, supported by four Columns — to build the Steeple with a Lightning Rod and Vane similar to those of the Brick Meeting House in Lebanon — to Elevate the roof as the Committee shall direct — to put the frame together & make it in all respects equal to that of the Meeting House in 116 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES Ellington — to finish the Pediment and Columns in the Ionic order, the sides with Ionic entablature, and the other end & belfry with the Ionic cornice — to make 44 windows in House, containing 40 squares each 7 & 9 glass, equal to the English Crown glass — two Venetian windows of a suitable size with a semi-circular window in the Pediment & gable end of the House and one window of a suitable size in the belfry — to make three Doors in front — to finish the doors and windows with double architraves & Keystones, excepting the Pulpit Window which is to be finished with a Frontispiece in the Ionic order — to Sheath the outside of the House with 4 inch square edge oak boards laid in the closest manner and covered with the best kind of white pine Clapboards six inches in width & nailed with sufficient wrought nails — to cover the roof with good square edged oak boards j of an inch in thickness Jaid in like manner — and the best of pine shingles 18 inches in length jointed & laid out not more than 5 inches — to paint with two good coats of Paint the clapboards of the House with a bright straw Color or white as the Committee shall direct. All the ornamented parts & Steeple white & the roof with a bright red or slate color as said committee shall direct — to lay double floors, the under one with 3 inch chestnut boards and the upper one with good inch oak boards — to make the porch on the ground floor at the east end, 9 feet in width with two flights of stairs — to divide the ground floor into Pews and slips as said Committee shall direct — to finish the Pulpit & Stairs in the style of those in the North Brick Meeting House in New Haven, provided the expense of the Pulpit does not exceed the expense of that at Ellington, & if it does, to finish the Pulpit in the same manner as that at Ellington, to make the Breastwork of the Gallery opposite the pulpit circular and finish it and the Columns in a style equal to that of the pulpit — make three Doors in the partition of the Porch leading into “NNOO ‘NUAVH MAN ‘SHOUNHD HLAON AHL SYOTUALNI ee THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, LYME, CONN. EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 117 the main body of the House — to finish all the doors and windows in the inside with double architraves — to divide the Gallery into pews and slips as the Committee shall direct — to make in the Ceiling over head a handsome oval arch extending from end to end & from side to side with a handsome cor- nice at the springing of the arch around the same — Lath & plaster the inside and paint all the wood work where necessary —to make the stairs ascending to the belfry & above bell deck, and the floors of the belfry & over the bell deck in the best possible manner with two inch white pine plank well and sufficiently painted —to cover the square or body of the belfry in the same manner as the outside of the House — to furnish all the materials for same House and where necessary of the best quality and perform the work in the best manner and in point of style, materials and workmanship to make said House equal to any Meeting House in the State of Connec- ticut east of the Connecticut River — to have said house half finished by the first day of Oct. next, and completed in every respect on or before the Ist day of July 1817. “Tt is also agreed by the parties, that should any accident happen to said Meeting House while building, either by the act of God or otherwise (except through the negligence or carelessness of said Belcher or his workmen), the loss is to be sus- tained by said Society; And thesaid Society, by their said Com- mittee on their part, in consideration of the premises aforesaid covenant and agree with the said Belcher to deliver on the spot where said House is to be built, on or beforethe 10th day of May next, or as soon after as required by the said Belcher, all the timber contained in the schedule hereto annexed well hewed, free from wane, and of the first quality, and all the joists and boards contained in said schedule well sawed and according to the dimensions given, to defray the expenses of raising said House except the labor of said Belcher & his workmen to pre- a 118 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES pare as soon as necessary the foundation ready to lay the sills and the risers & Step Stones to support the Columns — To pay to the said Belcher — upon the signing of this Indenture and as soon as the outside of said House is completed or other work equal thereto — and — when said House shall be completed ac- cording to Contract — and in case said sum shall not be paid at the time specified interest is to be allowed upon the same until paid. “The whole to be paid in money Current in this State — In Witness whereof the parties have hereunto set their Hands — the day & year above written.” Mr. Chapman continues: “Very little is known of Samuel Belcher, the builder of the church, and I suspect him to have been a master builder of excellent capacity rather than a trained architect. The work is reputed to have been done largely by ship carpenters, many of whom were, as you know, highly skilled artisans; and I often wondered at the grace and restrained beauty of the decoration of the interior. “Tt is interesting to learn that the four columns mentioned in the contract, each of which was about twenty-three feet in length and about two and a half feet in diameter, were single pine sticks. These were probably floated down the Connec- ticut; the core was bored out of each with a ship’s pump auger; they were rounded and fluted, and then set up in their places to stand for ninety years.” The Congregational Church at East Avon, built in 1819, is typical of the plainer New England meeting houses of the THE EAST AVON CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH HOYNHD IVNOILVOAYONOD NOAV LSVA FHL ‘MONTINI EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 119 early part of the nineteenth century, and it is included for that reason, rather than because of its intrinsic merit. There were dozens of small churches in the rural communities erected by local carpenters or builders, probably without architectural drawings, aside from those that could be obtained from the books of Asher Benjamin and others of that sort, such as were referred to in speaking of the Lyme church. Another thing that leads the writer to believe that most of these small churches were copied out of books, is the fact that the reredos (if a Congregational Church can be said to have one) is usually poorly treated, although the pulpit and reading desks were well designed; and in looking over these old books we find many designs for these articles of furniture, but none for the treatment of the back wall of a church, so that the builders had nothing to guide them and were forced to design as best they could. The First Congregational Church at Guilford is quite similar to that already described at Lyme, and is one of the latest of the New England churches in which the pure Colonial tradi- tion was followed, it having been begun only in 1829. The funds for its erection were collected by subscription, the sub- scribers receiving pews, or slips, as they were then called, in proportion to the amount of their subscription, although many of the congregation were in favor of raising the funds by taxation, and seating the congregation in the order of their age, as had been the previous custom. The Congregational 120 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES Church had, however, been disestablished as a State Church in Connecticut in 1818, and this method was therefore im- practical. The contract for the construction was let to Ira Atwater and Wilson Booth, of New Haven, for $6,500, and the size of the church was fixed in the contract at sixty feet wide and eighty feet long. The portico and tower were the subject of separate contract, bringing the total cost of the church to about $7,400. The pews were held by the original purchasers, and the church was supported by assessment of its members until 1850, when the pew owners gave them to the church by a joint deed, and those pews which were held by heirs of the original owners, or by persons no longer mem- bers of the society, were purchased. Changes .in the church have been slight, and these mainly in the interior: the galleries were lowered, the organs built, and the church frescoed, but otherwise the structure remains substantially in its original condition. It should be added that this is the third church of the congregation, the first having been built about 1650, and the second in 1714. ' There is no designer named in the church histories or other docu- ments relating to the building. In the previous chapters some attempt has been made to give the names of other existing churches of the period which have not been thought sufficiently interesting to be illustrated, but the remaining churches of the early part of the nineteenth century are so numerous, and the dividing line between the FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, GUILFORD, CONN. ‘NNOO ‘du¥OdTIND ‘HOUNHO TVNOILVOAYDNOO LSU AHL ‘YOIMALNI EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 121, churches architecturally of Colonial origin and those of the later Classic period is so indefinite, that no complete list would be possible. A few of these churches of some size and in- terest, although substantially duplicates of churches already in- cluded, might be named. The three churches at Simsbury, Southington, and Litchfield are substantially like those at Lyme and Guilford, although the Litchfield church has had the tower destroyed, and is now used as a moving-picture theatre; and on the Sound shore there are besides those already mentioned churches at Darien, Mystic, and Noank. Besides those men- tioned, the list could be extended considerably further, but probably without contributing anything of value to those already illustrated. CHAPTER VII CHURCHES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IN AND ABOUT MASSACHUSETTS HE Massachusetts churches of this period differed in no important respects from those in Connecticut. The church construction, especially in the rural com- munities, had grown to be more or less a formula, since there had been already erected a sufficient number of architecturally excellent buildings which served as precedents for practically all of the later country buildings, and in the cities alone were the new buildings designed from the beginning. Another interesting feature of this period is the very strong influence which Asher Benjamin’s books had upon design. We find repeatedly that buildings were apparently constructed from his sketches, and we find continual use of the ornament, in proportions laid down by him for various parts of buildings, in the churches subsequent to the publication of his books. This is especially true of the towns along the valley of the Connecticut River, since he worked in that section of the country, and at least one, and probably more, of his books were published in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and so strong was the type which he either expressed or created that it is only in parts of New England quite far removed from the 122 THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, BENNINGTON, VT. REE BENNINGTON, VT. THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, INTERIOR, EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 123 Connecticut Valley that we find evidences of really original design. The widespread influence which books had upon design in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries seems sur- prising to the reader of to-day, but, upon reflection, we will realize that this was only natural. In the first place, there were no schools of architecture; the designers — whether they were contractors or called themselves architects — were in- evitably self-taught to a large extent, learning the practical side of their work from carpenters in their immediate vicinity. Travel was, of course, extremely difficult and expensive, and while it is likely that a certain number of early American designers travelled about in their own neighborhood to learn by observation, general and widespread knowledge of a large part of the country, such as we to-day possess, was impossible to a great majority of the earlier men. It is true that in some cases we find that either the architects or the committees in charge of construction did travel for the specific purpose of examining such existing structures as were in their day considered meritorious. Such a trip was, as mentioned in an earlier chapter, made by the committee in charge of the build- ing of the Baptist Church at Providence, and, as a result, one of the committee became the designer. Such travel was, however, rather the exception than the rule, and the designers of early churches pinned most of their faith upon traditions of their own immediate vicinity aided byacertain number of books. 124 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES The influence of these books was more potent than it would be to-day even to the untravelled architect, because photo- graphs were unknown, and books were so much rarer that the ‘written word commanded a respect not now accorded it. The very fact that a man’s ideas were printed conferred upon them some semblance of authority, and opinions were easily accepted as facts. Now, all these conditions probably worked to the betterment of Colonial architecture, since the books which were in use by the Colonial builders were of an average merit far beyond those of the present generation, although, like most of our books to-day, their basis was the classic proportions as laid down by Vitruvius and drawn out and published by Palladio and Vignola. Like the others, the books written by Asher Benjamin had their foundation on the classic, and each one of his numerous books includes very careful drawings of each order, with pos- sible variations for the entablature and base, and so great was his reverence for the orders that he states: “The orders of architecture, as has been observed, are the basis upon which the whole decorative part of the art is chiefly built, and toward which the attention of the artist must ever be directed, even where no orders are introduced”; and this much is just as true to-day, of all the buildings executed in the classic style as it was the hundred odd years ago when Benjamin wrote. He was a man not only of artistic intelligence, but of good, sound common sense, and many interesting side lights are thrown ‘I ‘MW SAONACGIAOUd SHOYNHD TVNOILVOAYONOD LNAIIAINAD AHL AO WOIMALNI MEETING HOUSE HALL, DORCHESTER, MASSACHUSETTS EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 125 upon the methods of construction and the attitude of mind of the designers of the Colonial period by the shrewd and homely remarks which continually occurred in his writings. He real- ized, for example, that “books on architecture are already so numerous that adding to their number may be thought to require some apology,” with which the writer can only agree in presenting this one, but Benjamin’s reason for adding to the. number was to convince that “the style of building in this country differs very considerably from that of Great Britain and other countries in Europe, which is partly in consequence of a more liberal appropriation made for building in those countries, and of the difference in materials used, particularly in the external decorations; as the principal part of our designs have been executed by our own hands, we feel confident that this publication will be found to contain more useful informa- tion for the American workman than the European books which have appeared in this country, and which, for the most part, are mere copies one from the other.” Again, in writing of the orders, he says “‘that an exact imitation of the noble productions of earlier days, on account of the present expense of materials and labor, would require no common degree of opulence for their completion, and, indeed, a strict conformity to the orders of architecture seems to be demanded in the construction of public buildings only and others of immense magnitude. In such situations they have a most noble and majestic appearance, but in private buildings, 126 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES and others of less magnitude, their massy size and the expense attending them are little suited to our convenience and means of appropriation. A principal part, therefore, of our design in this work is to lighten the heavy parts and thereby lessen the expense both of labor and materials. ‘Attempts which have sometimes been made to compose fancy orders have only spoiled the work and no reduction of expense has been effected. . . . One important object in ‘improvement is a method of preserving the apparent size of an object elevated above the eye, while, at the same time, the real size is considerably diminished.” “It is easy to conceive that the size and effect of a cornice, for instance, does not depend on its height as it does on its projection; because cornices are always elevated to a con- siderable distance above the eye, and, of course, the apparent size depends principally on the projection.” From the above quotations we learn that the lighter and more delicate proportions of Colonial architecture were not used without a realization on the part of their designers that they were not adhering to the canonical proportions, and Benjamin, with all his reverence for the orders, has never drawn them in the classic proportion, not because he was igno- rant, but because he felt that that proportion was wrong. He says: ‘We have ventured to make some alterations in the proportion of the different orders by lengthening the shafts of the columns two diameters. Their entablatures and ‘H ‘N ‘HLOOWSLMOd ‘HOUNHO s,NHOL “LS 40 WOIMILNI SSNS N ed EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 127 pedestals bear nearly the same proportion as formerly except that the architrave has less height, the frieze more height (ex- cept in the Doric), and the cornice less height and more pro- jection.” Nor did Benjamin arrive at these conclusions entirely arbi- trarily; he actually worked out, in a sort of perspective, the space which the classic order would occupy, and compared it with the order as developed by him, ‘‘assuming that both cornices were regarded at an angle of 45 degrees from the hori- zon, which is the angle cornices are commonly seen at.” Com- paring the two cornices from this angle, he says: “This experiment proves that a cornice, when seen at an angle of 45 degrees, may be diminished one third of its height and appear to the spectator to be diminished only two elevenths, and, when seen at an angle of fifty degrees, it may be diminished one third and only appear to be diminished one sixth. Now by this it appears that if cornices are in the original orders one sixth too large, which they really are, they could be dimin- ished one third and have the appearance of being diminished only one sixth, which will make a saving of at least one quarter of the expense, besides saving us much of the height of the whole building, and at the same time havea lighter and better appearance.” This was accepted as Gospel truth by the men who used Benjamin’s books, for it never occurred to Benjamin or his contemporaries that cornices had actually been considered by 4 128 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES Palladio and Vignola as things to be built and not merely as ‘drawings, and that Palladio and Vignola, as well as Benjamin, had determined the proportions of their cornices and orders with regard to perspective as well as direct elevation; but we do at least learn from this that Benjamin thought about the proportion of his work in the round, and not in the drawing, which may be the real reason that so much of the Colonial work is executed well, for an all too common fault in modern architecture is to design an elevation without regard to per- spective. Aside from Benjamin’s remarks on the orders, we find his advice in other matters sound and sensible. Of ornament, he says: ‘It should neither be frugally employed nor distributed with too much profusion. Its value will increase in proportion to the judgment and discretion shown in its application,” and no professor in the Beaux Arts ever qualified the use of ornament in more sound and striking terms than did this country carpenter of Greenfield, Mass. Again about orna- ment, he writes: “The most exquisite ornaments lose all their value if they load, alter, or confuse the form they are designed to enrich and adorn.” Developing this theory, he says: “When friezes or other longer members are to be enriched, the ornaments may be significant and serve to indicate the destination or use of the building, the rank, qualities, profession, and achievements of the owner. In sacred places all obscene, grotesque, and THE PARK STREET CHURCH, BOSTON, MASS. S SS Ss WY cs Ty SSS INTERIOR, THE PARK STREET CHURCH, BOSTON, MASS. EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 129 heathenish representations ought to be avoided; for indecent fables, extraordinary conceits, or instruments and symbols of pagan worship are very improper ornaments in structures consecrated to Christian devotion.” While to-day we need no advice regarding obscene represen- tations, Benjamin’s remarks regarding the decoration of friezes might be well taken to heart by those architects who persist in decorating triglyphs with bulls’ skulls or with lyres — objects which in themselves are neither particularly decorative nor indicative of the use of the building, and only sheer laziness of design induces our architects to continue to use the ornaments originally designed to indicate the destination of the building, but which do not at all indicate the use of the modern structure to which they are applied. The remarks which we have quoted will serve to show the soundness of the theory which Asher Benjamin pursued, and it need only be said of the concrete examples with which he illustrates his theories that they no wise fall behind the theory in aptness and good taste, and whether the high quality of his design was appreciated by his contemporaries, or whether they were influenced alone by the accessibility of his publications, it is certain that his influence was beneficial and intense. The First Congregational Church at Bennington, Vermont, was dedicated on New Year’s Day, 1806, and the church rec- ords do not give any information about its designer;. but we find in Asher Benjamin’s book, “The Country Builder’s Assis- 130 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES tant,” published in Greenfield, Massachusetts, in 1805, a design for a church which is so very nearly similar to the Ben- nington Church that the writer can only surmise that either this building was built by Benjamin or that possibly Benjamin had access to the plans before his book was written, a thing quite improbable. The differences between the Bennington Church and that given in Benjamin’s book are, so far as the exterior goes, the use of circular-headed windows instead of square in the second story of the main building, the addition of a small entrance porch at the right-hand corner, and the omission of urns shown in Benjamin’s design at the corners of the square tower, where something of the sort is unques- tionably needed. Otherwise, the tower, the proportions of the building, the treatment of the facade, and the detail are pre- cisely similar to that given in the book. The treatment of the interior is, however, not the same, Benjamin’s scheme showing a high pulpit, which might, of course, have been part of the original design, since the present pulpit is evidently a reconstruction; and the ceiling treatment over the galleries is also different, but the points of resemblance, even in the in- terior, are more marked than the points of difference. The first settlement at Bennington was made about 1760, and the first meeting house was built about 1764-65. Ethan Allen was a member of the congregation, and the rector at the time of the Revolution was the Reverend Mr. Dewey, an ancestor of Admiral Dewey. After the battle of Bennington EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 131 some of the captives were for a while confined in this meeting house, and the first legislature of the State of Vermont began its existence in this building, and many subsequent legisla- tures assembled there before the State House was built. There is one story of Ethan Allen which deserves repetition: After his return from the capture of Ticonderoga, the parson, Mr. Dewey, held a thanksgiving service, and in the course of a long prayer, giving the entire credit of the victory to God, he was interrupted by Ethan Allen, who called out: “‘Please men- tion to the Lord about my being there.” St. John’s Church at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is one of the very few early New England churches which was of brick, and it was the second Episcopal Church in New England, the first being King’s Chapel in Boston. The original build- ing of the congregation was known as Queen’s Chapel, after Carolina Wilhelmina, wife of King George III, who presented to the congregation a prayer book, a silver communion ser- vice, and a Bible, the latter being one of the four copies of the so-called Vinegar Bible. In 1732 the second Queen’s Chapel was built, only to be burned in 1806, when the present building was begun; it was not completed until about 1818. When the older church was burned, the bell fell and was seriously dam- aged, and it was sent to Boston and recast by its maker, Paul Revere; again, in 1896, it was recast, this time by the succes- sors of the famous Colonial silversmith. Some of the church furnishings of St. John’s are of interest: the credence table is 132 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES made from wood formerly part of the United States Frigate Hartford, Admiral Farragut’s famous flagship, and the bap- tismal fount was a trophy taken by Captain Thomas Mason from the French when Senegal on the East coast of Africa was captured. Quite different in type is the Beneficent Congregational Church at Providence, Rhode Island, designed by an architect named John Green in 1807, and although the exterior was com- pletely rebuilt, probably about 1840, with a result which can hardly be called satisfactory, the lovely interior with the superb lighting fixtures has been thought worth including in this volume. The well-known Park Street Church in Boston is another church which shows nothing of Asher Benjamin’s influence; its designer was Peter Banner, and it is surprising to find no other building attributed to him, since the Park Street Church shows evidences of considerable originality and ability. It is perhaps the most impressive of all the old Boston Churches, both by reason of its size and of its location at a very conspic- uous point in the city, somewhat elevated above the general level of the surrounding buildings. The present structure was built in 1809, and shows no signs of the Classic Revival then beginning to make itself felt, but is strongly reminiscent of the earlier Colonial work, especially in the slimness of the orders and the lightness of the detail. In spite of the delicacy of its several parts, the building is as a Se SRS SNES THE OLD MEETING HOUSE, LANCASTER, MASS. INTERIOR, THE OLD MEETING HOUSE, LANCASTER, MASS. EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 133 whole rather clumsy and confused, the problem of dropping the facade below the main level of the church being evidently too much for the designer. One cannot feel in looking at the exterior that the change in height of the windows has been very well managed, and the small semi-circular porches, or whatever they may be called, between the tower and the main building, though well designed in themselves, and being perhaps an experiment worth trying, are certainly not success- fully managed; nor is the connection between the main building and the tower at all happy, the cornice of the main building cutting squarely across the lower part of one of the tower windows. Nevertheless, the structure is architecturally one of the most interesting of our early churches, because its archi- tect was not content with the duplication of existing success- ful buildings, but honestly tried to solve a rather difficult problem instead of begging the question by treating the building as if it were on one level, and reaching the entrance by steps. In marked contrast with the exterior, the interior is very strongly tinged with Greek color, but only half understood and distinctly amateurish. The plan is admirable, the seating well arranged, and the treatment of the rear wall agreeable because of its simplicity. The old Meeting House at Lancaster, Massachusetts, is one of the few surviving church structures designed by the greatest of the early American architects, Charles Bullfinch. It was 134 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES erected in 1810, and exhibits some of the influence of the Classic Revival, of which Bullfinch was the greatest of our early exponents. The history of Bullfinch is pretty com- pletely known, and is worth transcribing as a record of the architectural training of the day. He was born in Boston in 1763, graduated from Harvard in the class of 1781, and en- tered a counting house; but the business of the town was para- lyzed by the war, and Bullfinch had leisure to exhibit a marked interest in architecture, reading such architectural books as he could obtain, and practising by making minor changes in his father’s and neighbors’ houses, but he did no serious profes- sional work until after his return from abroad, where he went in 1781, remaining for a year or two in England and on the Continent. He returned to Boston in 1786, and gradually became a regular practitioner of architecture, the only one then in Boston, and while his design shows evidences of his European training, especially that in England, the lightness and grace of his detail resembles rather the earlier Colonial work than that of the English successors of Wren, whose design was not conspicuous for its taste or refinement. He was a designer of several of the early American churches in Boston, the reconstruction of the spire of what is known as Old North, a stone church at Washington, wooden churches at Pittsfield, Taunton, and Weymouth, as well as the brick Meeting House at Lancaster. He also designed the State House at Boston, and after the War of 1812 was appointed architect for the Capi- EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 135 tol at Washington, taking charge in 1817, although as to just how far he followed the design of his predecessors is not known. Others of his prominent buildings were University Hall at Harvard, which is an extraordinarily lovely college building; Boston Market in Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the State House. But with all these buildings he has done nothing lovelier than the pulpit and interior of the Lancaster Meeting House, one of the most exquisite pieces of design which has ever been executed. The church at Lenox, Massachusetts, was built in 1805; it was possibly copied from the Bennington Church situated not very far away, or taken entirely from Asher Benjamin’s book, or possibly designed by Isaac Damon, who was the architect of the County Court House, which was built in Lancaster in the same year. The building is small, simple, and plain; the interior, of really considerable merit, is very greatly injured by the treatment over the pulpit, evidently not a part of the original scheme. The first settlement in Lenox was begun in 1750, but be- cause of their fear of the Indians, five years later most of the inhabitants left town, returning not long afterward. In 1767 the town was incorporated, and in 1769 the Congregational Church was organized. Two sites were designated by the town, but construction being delayed for various reasons, neither of them was finally chosen, and the proprietors in 1760 voted to build on the site furnished by the heirs of the Rever- s 136 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES end Peter Reynolds, who came to Lenox from Somers, Conn. He was one of seven men who united to purchase the property of an “undesirable citizen’ of Stockbridge and who were com- pensated by the community by the donation of four thousand acres of uncleared land, comprising the present site of the town of Lenox. This was called in those days the “ Ministers’ Grant,” since five of them were ministers, and it was part of this land, about three acres in all, which was offered for the church and was finally selected. The first meeting house was begun in 1770, but was not com- pleted until five years later. It was about thirty-five feet wide and forty-five feet long, and was of a “suitable height for that bigness” — whatever that might be. In 1880 the town had a population of over one thousand, and feeling that the original church was inadequate, at a town meeting, in 1803, it was voted that certain men be appointed a committee to “digest a plan relative to building a meeting house.” The committee determined to defray the expense of construction by public sale of the pews, and to erect the building by ‘‘the job or jobs and not by the day,” or, as we would express it now, the building was to be erected by contract and not by commission. | At the town meeting it was voted that “the body of the meeting house be sixty-four feet long and fifty feet wide, and a projection for a tower of eight feet by twenty-six feet.”” Some tentative plan for the construction must certainly have been THE FIRST CHURCH, LENOX, MASS. SOSA, > INTERIOR, THE SSN SES FIRST CHURCH, LENOX, MASS, EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 137 in existence, since the dimensions were so accurately fixed; and the plan submitted by the committee for square pews, forty-six in all, was also accepted. The builder was Benjamin D. Goodrich, who was paid $5,000 for his part of the work, the cost of furnishings, bell, etc., bringing the total cost up to $6,619. The architect is not named, and as above suggested, Isaac Damon may have been responsible, and there is also some question as to whether one John Hulett, who built the meeting houses at Lee and Richmond, in the neighborhood of Lenox, was not chosen, although it is very probable that the committee itself drew up some sort of a sketch for the building which followed in a general way the plans of the two meeting houses built by Hulett, which closely approximated the di- ~mensions of the one at Lenox. The first alteration in the building was made in 1840, when the slip pews were substituted for the old square ones, and, as usual, the pulpit and the front of the gallery were lowered at the same time. We have had occasion to note in speaking of many of the old churches that these changes were made, and it may be said that this change was the rule rather than the exception, so a word or two of explanation may here not be out of place. The old square pews were usually built high enough so that, when seated, the occupants could not see their neighbors over them. The fronts of the galleries were likewise high enough so that the young men on one side and the young girls on the other — for whom the side galleries were respectively 138 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES reserved — could not see each other; therefore the pulpit was elevated until it was high enough for the minister to be in sight of the entire congregation. This invariably necessitated a long flight of steps up to the pulpit, the floor of which had to be placed about on a level with the gallery, and when the old square pews were altered to the “slip” type, the pulpit was lowered to save the preacher the awkwardness and undignity of mounting a long flight of steps with his back to the congre- gation. Sometimes these steps led up to both sides of the pulpit, and sometimes only to one side, but as the pulpit was usually in the New England churches placed directly against the rear wall in the place occupied by the altar in the Episcopal and Catholic churches, they were necessarily steep and awk- ward, and while the new lower pulpits were not as a rule so well designed as the older ones, their position and size were infinitely better. Stoves were introduced in the building before 1836, for in December of that year a special meeting of the congregation was called to decide upon changing their location, since in previous years more than ten dollars had been spent for fuel, and even then the church was not warm. The present heating apparatus was installed about 1880. The beginnings of a choir were recognized in 1850 by setting aside certain seats in the gallery over the porch for those who assisted in singing, and in 1853 a committee was named to “investigate the sub- ject of procuring such an instrument of music as they thought EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 139 proper.” They bought for $142 a “Seraphim” — presumably some kind of an organ, and not an angel. The church has had quite an uneventful life, and the history of its construction has been gone thus minutely into, not be- cause of the importance of the building, but because the minutes of the church have been more carefully preserved than is usually the case, and, as in all probability a similar process was gone through when most of the early Massachusetts churches were constructed, it has seemed wise to give this rather full account of the method of procedure, to illustrate the points of resemblance to and dissimilarity from those now current. Certain other things are learned from the minutes of the town and of the Berkshire Association of Ministers. We learn from the town minutes that the town paid the cost of the upkeep of the church and also paid for the bell ringing, etc., and while these expenses were not very heavy, being $15 in 1810, and $11.75 in 1812, the interesting fact is that the town paid them, and not the congregation. In 1808 the Berkshire Association of Ministers voted unanimously to have the Scriptures read at divine service. Previous to that time the reading of the Scriptures was thought to be an empty form savoring of Episcopal worship, which was of course anathema to the descendants of the Puritans. It was only very slowly that the New England churches progressed to a less barren form of worship, and the early services seem to have consisted only of informal and lengthy prayers, the singing of one or two 140 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES hymns, and an extemporaneous and lengthy sermon. The text was sometimes chosen by one of the congregation on the spot to make sure that the minister did not cheat by preparing his sermon in advance! Just why our-New England ancestors had the idea that ignorance of a subject would promote its religious value does not appear, but for more than two cen- turies the minister who could exhort his congregation without preparation was the man in demand, and any symptom of a set and regular procedure was regretted by the congregations. Certain elements of this persist to-day, although well-fixed portions of the Episcopal liturgy have gradually come to have a place in both the Presbyterian and Congregational churches, as, for example, the responsive reading of the Psalms, and the Benediction. The collection they had always with them, al- though the singing of the Doxology during the taking of the collection is a rather recent innovation. The First Church at Springfield, Massachusetts, built in 1818, was certainly designed by Isaac Damon, and is a much more elaborate structure, although the building committee in the instructions which it received on its appointment was required to procure plans for a church “with a decent, plain front.” Isaac Damon was the best known of the country architects of his time; he is reputed to have studied under Ithiel Town, and probably was a draughtsman or super- intendent for him. The first structure which he designed independently was the extremely elaborate church building THE FIRST CHURCH, SPRINGFIELD, MASS. “SSVW ‘CIadIMONIYdS ‘HOWNHOD Lswld AHL EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 141 at Northampton, Massachusetts, which was burned in 1878, and at the time that he was called from Town’s office in New York to make the plans and direct the work of this building he was only twenty-eight years old. This was in 1812, and from then until his death he was constantly engaged in public or semi-public work, and in addition to designing buildings he acted as a sort of overseer, or general contractor, without assuming the financial responsibility of a general contractor He was an excellent draughtsman, and some of his rendered elevations, done in India, ink, are the best old American draw- ings which have been preserved. Others of his buildings are a church in Pittsfield, the Court House in Pittsfield, the North Church at Ware, and a number of bridges across the Connec- ticut, Penobscot, Hudson, and Ohio rivers, for he was a good engineer as well as an excellent architect, and was reported to have been the originator of the bowstring truss. Springfield was settled in 1636, and the first meeting house was built in 1645; it was forty feet long and twenty-five feet wide, and lasted only until 1677, when the second building, sixty feet long and forty-six feet wide, was constructed; the third was built in 1752, and was a wooden structure of fair size, resembling the South Church in Boston. The present edifice has stood without changes, except those which seem to have been customary —namely, of lowering the pulpit and substi- tuting slip pews for square pews; the organ also was a later introduction. 142 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES The church at Dorchester is like that of Lyme, a recon- struction of the original building, done by Messrs. Everett and Mead, following the original scheme, which was the fourth at Dorchester, and was probably built or reconstructed in about 1816, the information at hand not being clear on this point. The frontispiece of this volume is the old church at Ware, ‘Massachusetts, designed by Isaac Damon, and is perhaps as nearly typical of the early nineteenth century work as could be found. It is simple, extremely dignified, ecclesiastical, and yet is filled with the truest architectural feeling for pro- portion and detail, and while it is small, of wood, and inex- pensive, it is nevertheless one of the loveliest of all the old churches. Very similar to the Ware church in a general way is that at Deerfield, built in 1824, which is, however, of brick for the lower part, with the tower and roof of wood. The architect is not known, but was not improbably Isaac Damon again; it is certainly very similar to his work. The congregation is an old one, the original meeting house having been built before 1675, and the present is the third of the structures erected on the same site. It is said that some of the interior work of the present building was removed from its predecessor, but the only accessory of the present building which is definitely known to have been part of the older structure is the weather- cock, which was bought by the congregation in 1757 for £20. This concludes the list of New England churches which the MASS. THE MEETING HOUSE, DEERFIELD, “SSVW ‘C1aIdUaaC LY HOUNHD AHL JO UYOTAALNI EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 143 writer has thought it necessary to illustrate or describe, and it will be found that there is no one of these buildings which does not possess much that is picturesque or lovely, and that each of them has had some importance during the history of the country, or in the development of its architecture. CHAPTER VIII NINETEENTH CENTURY CHURCHES IN THE SOUTH Y comparisson with New England, the early years of the nineteenth century in the Southern States show a dearth of interesting structures. The causes of this were economic, not religious, and had their basis on the same ground that was the cause of so many other contrasts between the Northern and Southern States — slavery. At the conclusion of the Revolutionary War emigration from Europe to the South practically terminated; the land had been pretty well taken up in large grants; there were few manufactories of any sort, and poor men could not afford to enter into agricultural competition against the men whose land was tilled by slaves whose labor cost them nothing. Besides checking the flow of immigration, slavery was indirectly the cause of another condition which tended to check church building. The distinctions between the wealthy and the poor constantly became sharper and more distinct; as is always the case, the natural increase of the wealthy class was much less than that of the poorer, and the eighteenth century churches remained adequate to house the wealthier parts of their con- | gregations and tended to segregate themselves from the poorer whose church structures were plain, cheap, and bare. Again, 144 THE INDEPENDENT PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SAVANNAH, GEORGIA ¥ ‘ VIOUOdD ‘HVNNVAVS ‘HOUNHD NVIMSLAGS Tua INTGNAdAGNI FHL “WOMMTLNI SSS SS Sate EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 145 as the South, because of the lack of free labor, became more and more an agricultural country, the growth of the cities was checked, and it is always in the cities that the most money is spent on churches, so that the four churches of the early nineteenth century illustrated in this chapter, which comprise about the only early nineteenth century churches of size and architectural merit in the South, were all of them erected in city districts, and one of these, St. Philip’s, was built to replace an old church destroyed by fire. The earliest of the four is the Independent Presbyterian Church at Savannah, Georgia, which was begun in 1800, pos- sibly from the designs of an English architect named Jay, although this is not certain. We are accustomed to think of Savannah as being a very old city, but it was only settled in 1738, and for many years its growth was very slow, so that the interesting old houses for which Savannah is, like Charles- ton, noted, were most of them erected at about the be- ginning of the nineteenth century. The English architect, Jay, was for many years a practitioner in Savannah, designing not only a number of the best of the houses, but also the Telfair Art Gallery, and it is supposed the Independent Presbyterian Church. The structure illustrated is unfortunately not the original one, which was a wooden building destroyed by fire some years since, but one built of white marble from measured drawings of the old work, to replace it, and photographs of the old and new buildings are hardly distinguishable, since the 146 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES proportions of the wooden structure were very exactly fol- lowed in masonry. The spire above the tower is of wood, and is one of the best designed of all the old church spires, both in the method of transition from the square to the octagonal, and in the proportion of each story. The window treatment is distinctly not of the usual Colonial type, the tracery sug- gesting Gothic motives, a method of sub-division which pos- sibly may have been changed from the original designs. Al- though the building appears to be an oblong, it is, as were many of the older churches, square, roofed with a gable roof, and terminated with a porch and tower. The interior is covered with a flat dome, supported on four columns, which also carry galleries. The church is the most famous in Georgia and very properly so, since it is quite the handsomest in the city, and one of which any community might well be proud. The Monumental Church in Richmond, Virginia, is in de- sign unique in this country, and resembles rather a museum or a banking structure than a church. It was built in 1812, Robert’ Mills being the architect, and was evidently very strongly influenced by the Classic movement then just begin- ning, but it was handled with such freedom: and vigor that we are compelled to believe its architect to have been a great and original thinker. The treatment of the columns between piers is of course a well-known Greek motif, very unusual in early American work, but has become to-day a favorite method of treating a narrow fagade, since the corners are VINIOWIA ‘GNOWHOIM S‘HOUNHD TVLNAWNNOW FHL ‘VA “QNOWHOIY ‘HOWNHD TVINIWOANOW AHL ‘YOIrMaLNI EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 147 admirably strong without taking up a great deal of room. The design as a whole is one of the earliest in which the work of the Greek Revival is suggested, but the columns are not in the least Greek in proportion, and the treatment of the fagade is rather what we might expect in the most advanced modern work imstead of in that of the period immediately succeeding the Colonial. The treatment is curiously tentative; its de- signer evidently recognized the beauty of the Greek order, but hesitated to depart from the tall, slender proportions of the Colonial columns toward the solid, thick Grecian ones. There are many cases of early American churches in which the ceiling was formed by a flat dome, but this is one of the very few, and perhaps the only one, in which it is suggested in the exterior as well, and where it seems to have a real and logical reason for its existence. It is perhaps a fault in most of the early American churches that their designers failed to work out a real solution of ceiling treatment; certainly vault- ing executed in plaster, as was the case in Christ Church in Boston, and in Trinity Church, Newport, and domical ceilings in plaster, such as were used in the Centre Church at New Haven, have lost their true significance and become purely decorative forms; and while most decorative forms have been evolved from structural ones, such a ceiling treatment as that of the Centre Church, where the dome is absolutely unsupported in effect, and in reality is hung from the roof beams, is hardly excusable. Even in the case of the Monumental Church, the 148 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES correspondence between the interior and exterior treatment is in a measure superficial, since the domed plaster ceiling of the auditorium is clearly within the lines of support, and was evidently considered as a ceiling treatment, and not as a structural feature. The octagonal plan also is a marked departure from what was customary at that early period, and in principle approached more nearly the auditorium plans common in Baptist and Methodist churches to-day than either the square plan of the early New England churches or the long, narrow plan of the English and Virginia churches. This has resulted, however, in an interior unique, practical, and attractive, and quite as well suited for the Episcopal services as the traditional one. Some part of the many curious fea- tures of its design is perhaps due to its being a memorial church, a monument (as its name indicates) erected in mem- ory of seventy-two people who were killed by the burning of a theatre on December 26, 1811, and the urn in front of the portico is supposed to contain the ashes of some of the victims. St. Paul’s Church in Augusta, Georgia, was built in 1819 at a cost of $30,000; the architect’s name has been forgotten, but the church has been restored and remodelled several times since its erection, and the interior at least could never be recognized by the designer. The first settlement at Augusta was a trading post established in 1676 by order of General Oglethorpe, and the town at this time was laid out and a fort, EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 149 named Fort Augusta in honor of the mother of George III, was built on a bluff overlooking the Savannah River. The first church at Augusta was built in 1750 on a site which would be under protection of the guns of the fort. During the Revolutionary War Fort Augusta was three times taken and retaken, and the old church was appropriated first by the Continental troops as a barracks, and afterward by the English for other military purposes. During the siege of the fort in 1781 by the Americans under Light Horse Harry Lee the churchyard became a battlefield, and the building was practically destroyed by an American cannon mounted on a log tower nearby. The second building was erected in 1786, and lasted until the erection of the present structure. While this building has not experienced the vicissitudes of war, it has suffered very severely from earthquakes, which destroyed a great part of the interior and cracked thewalls of the building; and to forestall any danger of damage from possible future earthquakes the ceiling was made of wood in place of the original plaster. The most distinguished of its pastors was Bishop Leonidas Polk, whose name is more familiar to us under his other title, Lieutenant General in the Army of the Confederate States of America. For more than fifty years after its foundation, St. Paul’s Church was the only one of any kind in Augusta. Its rectors were, as is usual with Episcopal churches in the colonies, sent out by the English church, and the first of them, the Reverend 150 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES Jonathan Copp, found the conditions for his work very difficult. The people in Augusta lived “‘in fear of their lives” both be- cause of the neighborhood of Indians and because “a great concourse of absconding debtors had taken refuge here,”’ but, encouraged by the better class of people, services were regularly held in the parish church, and missionary services were even conducted in the surrounding country. This missionary work was continued and extended by the third rector, the Reverend Ellington, who was said to have been seldom home except on Sundays, undertaking journeys of more than one hundred miles. | At the conclusion of the Revolutionary War the church and the glebe of three hundred acres were confiscated by the state, because the rector during the Revolution was a Tory; the glebe was given to the Trustees of the Richmond Academy (who were also trustees of the town) and was used to endow the school. As the.old church had been destroyed by the Americans during the war, no building was available for wor- ship until the new owners of the property built a small wooden structure in which services continued to be held by Epis- copal clergymen until 1804, when the building was rented for five years to the Presbyterians. Earnest efforts being made by the Episcopalians, the title was restored to them by the legislature in 1818, and the present brick building was erected. The churchyard contains many interesting monuments, al- VIOUOAD “VISNONV SHOWNHD S.TNVvd “LS "VD ‘VISNONV SHOUNHD s Invd “LS SMOIMALNI 6 i} | \\ i | a i ee eee eee SP a hao EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 151 though the oldest were destroyed during the battles of 1781. Among those buried there are George S. Washington, a nephew of General Washington; Commodore Oliver Bowen of the United States Navy; William Longstreet, one of the men who invented a practicable steamboat prior to the voyage of the Claremont, and others of lesser reputation. William Thomp- son of Pennsylvania, an officer in the Continental Army, as well as a great number of the soldiers, both Continental and Royal, who perished here during the several battles of the Revolutionary War, were interred in the cemetery, the graves being marked by suitable memorials. Of all the Southern churches, that about which the most tradition clusters is St. Philip’s at Charleston, South Carolina, _ fondly called by the people of Charleston “'The Westminster of South Carolina,” because of the many distinguished men who have been buried in the churchyard and in the vaults under the church. The charter under which the colony was founded granted ' to the lords proprietors of the colony the patronage of all churches and chapels—that is, they had the power to name and appoint ministers, and they had also authority to build and found churches. It is not certainly known when the first building at Charleston was built, but there was no church building as early as 1682, since a clerk on board a ship which visited Charleston in that year says: “The town is regularly laid out in largé and capacious streets . . . in that they 152 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES have reserved therein places for a church, town house and other public structures.” The site reserved for the church was that upon which now stands St. Michael’s, but on it was built the first St. Philip’s Church, which was originally known simply as “The Church,” or “The English Church,” the word English being used probably because there were a number of French Huguenot settlers in South Carolina. The second church of St. Philip’s was begun in 1710, and was a large brick building; it was opened for worship in 1723, and lasted until it was burned in 1835, when the present building was built from designs of Mr. J. Hyde. As was the case in Virginia, South Carolina suffered from the characters of some of its early ministers. No provision had been made by the government or by the Church of England for Episcopal supervision of the clergy who came out to America, and the scandals of many of the clergymen in the colonies induced the Bishop of London to send out commissaries charged with the general administration of the church and the supervision of the clergy, but these com- ‘missaries seem to have been of little utility. The first sent to South Carolina, a clergyman named Gideon Johnson, de- scribed the people to whom he was sent as “the vilest race of men on earth, with neither honor, honesty, nor religion.” The congregation of St. Philip’s was in the main free from clergymen of evil life, although the first incumbent, a man named Marsden, was probably not an ordained minister, EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 153 but simply an impostor, and he was turned out by the com- missary, the Johnson above mentioned. Johnson soon be- came himself the rector, and in spite of his early opinion of the colonists was efficient and beloved. As we have already noted with regard to Virginia, the church and state were pretty nearly a single organization, and the vestry of St. Philip’s had so much authority that a number of the inhabitants of "Charleston petitioned against it. This petition included the signatures of many of the Huguenots, who were themselves governed by a vestry which they had no power to elect; the petition was granted and the vestry was relieved of some of its power. The proprietors of the colonies at the time of their founda- tion endeavored to impose upon the colonists the so-called Fundamental Constitution, which included the following clause: “As the country comes to be sufficiently planted and distributed into fit divisions, it shall belong to the Parliament to take care for the building of churches and the direct main- tenance of divines to be employed in the exercise of religion, according to the Church of England, which being the only true and orthodox and the national religion of all the King’s domin- ions, is so also of Carolina; therefore, it alone shall be allowed to receive public maintenance by grant of Parliament.” This provision was quite in accord with the practice of that early day in the Puritan provinces of the North no less than in the Episcopal provinces of the South, but because it was 154 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES never assented to by the people of the Carolinas it was never constitutionally in force, although we find that for some time the people of the provinces accepted acts of their governors which carried out this provision as though it were technically legal. The first Governor of the colony, Sayle, although him- self reported to be a Puritan, upheld this provision and wrote the proprietors asking for a clergyman of the Church of Eng- land; and in a later letter signed by him and six others jointly he urges the want of an able minister by whose means “cor- rupted youth might be reclaimed and the people instructed.” The first minister in the province was perhaps the Reverend Mr. Williamson in the settlement at Charles Town, although this was not the first settlement in the Carolinas, the original one having been at Old Town on the Ashley River, but it does not appear that there was any church built in that town. The exact date of the arrival of the Reverend Mr. Williamson is not known, but it was prior to 1681, since he is mentioned as having performed a marriage at that time. He was probably not known as rector of St. Philip’s, for we find no record of any provision having been made for his support, nor was there any church building erected so early; what official position he held is therefore doubtful. The support of the minister for St. Phillip’s Church was first provided for in 1698, during the incumbercy of the Reverend Samuel Marshall, who, we learn from the act, had “‘left a considerable benefice and honorable way of living in England to come out to Carolina ST. PHILIP'S CHURCH, CHARLESTON, S. C. INTERIOR, ST. PHILIP’S CHURCH, CHARLESTON, S. C. EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 155 out of the zeal he had for the propagation of the Christian religion, and particularly of the Church of England.” The act provided that he should enjoy all of the lands, houses, negroes, cattle, and moneys appointed for the use, benefit, and behoof of the minister of Charles Town, and specifically ap- propriated forever. It also directed that a negro man and a negro woman and four cows and calves should be purchased for his use and paid for out of the public funds. The first vestry of the church included, besides men of English descent, three Huguenots — Colonel Prioleau and two others — all of whom subscribed to the test as it was called; in other words, agreed to the fundamental provisions of the doctrines of the Church of England, especially as regarded the doctrine of transubstantiation. This vestry exercised con- siderable governmental authority, relieving the poor, col- lecting fines, and paying out funds for the maintenance of the poor. We find that they collected fines from a man who swore without a book; from a man who knocked down Mr. Pinckney’s negro; from a man who retailed rum on Sunday; from others who walked about the streets on Sunday during divine service, and from other white men who knocked down or abused negroes. Quite large sums were imposed for this latter offence, £2 being the average, while the rumseller was fined only 10 shillings. -This vestry also secured an appropriation or grant of public land in Charles Town from the assembly of the state, for the 156 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES erection of a workhouse and hospital, with authority to erect buildings for these purposes on it at their own expense; and such a hospital was built and carried on as St. Philip’s Hos- pital, being of especial service during the yellow fever epi- demics which several times occurred during the years prior to the Revolution. Besides these activities, they also con- ducted a school, which was at least in part a free school for whites, as well as a school for Indians and negroes described below. An interesting advertisement by one of the commissaries of the state appeared in the South Carolina Gazette on March 11, 1743. It stated that the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, having at heart the education of the negroes and Indian races, had resolved on the following method of pur- suing that end: to purchase some country born negroes and cause them to be instructed to read the Bible, and in the chief precepts of the Christian religion, and thenceforth employ them as schoolmasters for the same instruction of all negro and Indian children born in the colonies. The advertise- ment proceeds to state that the Society had purchased about fifteen months previously two suitable negroes and assigned one of them to Charleston, who would be sufficiently qualified in a few months, and the advertisement concludes with an appeal for a contribution of £400 to complete the school- house. The school was actually built and continued in use for about twenty years, when one of the teachers died, and EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 157 the other “turned out profligate,” and as the Society made no further investments in this educational commodity the school was discontinued. As was noted when writing of St. Michael’s, this church was founded by St. Philip’s because the congregation had become too large, and St. Michael’s was continued as a chapel of St. Philip’s until 1797, when the churches were formally sepa- rated, and the land which belonged to both divided. The extent of governmental authority in church affairs appears from the fact that the second St. Philip’s Church was ordered to be erected by an act of the Assembly in 1710, and a second act of the Assembly in 1720 was passed to hasten its construction. This second church is mentioned with some particularity because while the present church was not an exact duplicate of the older one, it resembles it to a very large extent. In 1766 the second building was written of as follows: “This church is allowed to be the most elegant religious edifice in British America. It is built of brick; length one hundred feet, breadth sixty feet, height forty feet, with a cupola of fifty feet with two bells and a clock and a bell. It has three por- ticos before the West, South, and North doors. It is built from the model of the Jesuit Church at Antwerp, having gal- leries around, exceeding well planned for sight and hearing.” This description is sufficiently exact to indicate the more than general resemblance between the two edifices. Charleston has been repeatedly devastated by fires, con- 158 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES flagrations of considerable size having occurred in 1740, 1778, 1796, and 1810, and finally in the great fire of 1835 St. Philip’s was destroyed. The cornerstone of the new building was laid on November 12th of the same year. It was built of brick on the old foundations, except that the eastward or chancel end was extended something over twenty feet. The main changes from the old building are that it was raised about three steps from the ground, where the other was flush, and where the tower of the older building terminated with a cupola, this is concluded with a spire two hundred feet high, designed by Edward B. White. It is of interest to note that the celebrated evangelist, George Whitefield, after preaching in the Middle States and New England, was tried for heresy in this church. Among the men of distinction who are buried in the churchyard of St. Philip’s, or to whom monuments are erected in the church itself, are General William Moultrie, Bishop Gadsden, John C. Calhoun, William Rhett, Governors Daniel, Johnson, Lowndes, and Rutledge, and many of the chief justices of the colony, and other state officers; General Thomas Pinckney, who fought in the wars of the Revolution and of 1812, and was afterward minister to England and Spain; Admiral Shubrick and his brothers, a number of the members of Congress, and many of the soldiers of the War of the Rebellion. It is much to be regretted that the early part of the nine- teenth century in the South does not show a large number EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 159 of ecclesiastical monuments of interest; the proportion of well-designed churches in the South has never been as great as that in the Northern and Middle States, although many of them were among the most interesting and beautiful in the United States. In thinking back over the list of churches in the Southern States, we find the earliest of all, St. Luke’s at Smithfield, to be extremely well designed, of durable materials, and intrinsically as well as historically interesting. The Bruton Parish Church has a quaint charm possessed by few other buildings of its time; St. Michael’s and St. Philip’s in Charleston are of unusual high quality of design, and of a type which can only be compared to some of the English buildings; the Monumental Church at Richmond deserves to be aforerunner of anepoch of design, and with such examples as these before it, the decadence into which architecture fell in the South, and from which it is just beginning to emerge, is the more lamentable because of the unusual excellence of the earlier work. CHAPTER IX NINETEENTH CENTURY CHURCHES IN THE MIDDLE STATES HE churches in the Middle States during the early nineteenth century, like those of the South, fall behind the standard previously established in that part of the country, and also are less interesting than the work in New England of the same period. It was in the Middle States that the successive styles of design which disfigured the archi- tecture of the nineteenth century earliest became prevalent, and succeeding the lovely early Colonial architecture, the buildings were designed in the style of the Greek Revival, that of the bastard Italian Renaissance, the Strawberry Hill Gothic, and the monstrous Queen Anne. The dearth of good material to illustrate is not caused by the paucity of new buildings, but by the poor quality of the design of most of them, although we find a few examples of the most excellent Gothic architecture, due largely to the influence of Upjohn, at a time when the rest of the United States was continuing to experiment with some of the many varieties of Classic. We have then remaining in various parts of the Middle States, and especially in the neighborhood of New York, a comparatively large number of churches which were built during the early nineteenth century, and which do not fall 160 THE NORTH REFORMED CHURCH, SCHRAALENBURG, N. J. Agsual MAN ‘DYNANTIVVUHOS ‘HOYNHO GANAOATA HLYON FHL “UOTHALNI i Ny N N N Ny N BS EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 161 within the scope of this work because, while historically they may house old congregations, architecturally they are far dif- ferent from the Colonial buildings in style. It is unnecessary to point to specific examples, but it may in general be said that the earliest churches of the Gothic revival in the United States, with the exception of Trinity Church in New Haven, were built in the neighborhood of New York, and it is quite astonishing to find so thorough a comprehension of the motives and prin- ciples of Gothic construction as are displayed in Trinity Church in New York following immediately upon the heels of the Greek Revival. In fact, the earlier of the Gothic churches in New York were probably the best which were built until the beginning of the present century, because of the potent influence of Mr. Upjohn, one of the most distinguished Ameri- can architects who worked in the Gothic style. It is also rather an interesting fact that in the Middle States the Greek Revival has left us few surviving examples by com- parison with New England or even the South. In New Eng- land the Greek Revival took early root and long persisted, so that certain New England churches, built as late as 1850, were designed in a type precisely similar to that which began to manifest itself in 1815, and many of the so-called old Colonial churches of New England are really not early American churches at all, but date from this Greek Revival period. In New York City the Greek Revival seems to have had quite as much influence upon residences as it did in New England, 162 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES but there are few if any churches of the period remaining in New York City, and very few elsewhere in the Middle States, except in the counties of New York east of the Hudson River, which geographically, if not administratively, form part of New England. However, as late as 1830 certain churches were built in which the traditions of the early American art was still the dominant factor, even though the mouldings and decorative ornament used on them were Greek rather than Colonial, and one or two of these have been included in this chapter as instances of the last efforts of a dying art. Of course, in each of these cases there was some particular reason for the old traditions having been followed; they were either built in districts comparatively remote from the centres of population, or else they were copies of some earlier church fancied by an important member of the congregation. The church at Tappan, described later in this chapter, seems to be one in which both causes were operative. Tappan is, of course, a very short distance from New York City, and was near the main artery of travel in those days — the Hudson River — but it was then, nevertheless, and still remains to- day, a secluded backwater in the current of progress, and, with the other Dutch communities in Bergen County, New Jersey, was solely the centre of a farming district. Farmers have always been notable conservatives, which doubtless explains their slowness to adopt new motives. In fact the whole of Bergen County was for many years curiously isolated from TRINITY CHURCH, NEWARK, N. J. ‘f (N SHYVMAN ‘SHOUNHO ALINIUL SAOTYTLNI EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 163 the path of progress; no principal highways passed through its boundaries, since there were no great cities which had to be reached by traversing it, and while one of the most fertile and easily cultivated of all the districts near New. York, it was so devastated and desolated during the Revolutionary War that its recovery of prosperity was very slow, and the very many churches which were built within it during the years succeeding the Revolution, to replace those burned or destroyed during the war, were in most cases small and plain, although substantial, structures of stone, erected by local builders. The inhabitants of the county to-day in most cases fail to remember the events of the war in which their forefathers suffered as did the inhabitants of no other part of the United States with the exception of Westchester County. No great battle, it is true, took place in Bergen County, but it was several times traversed by both the Colonial and British armies, with all the destruction of property which such an event entails, and, being a farming country accessible to New York, it was foraged over and over again by the British ia and much of the crops were destroyed by the Colonials to prevent them from falling into the hands of the British. Partisan bands calling themselves British or Continental, as suited their con- venience, burned and pillaged without mercy, and the county was at the end of the war left in a condition of utter prostra- tion almost inconceivable. For seven years the British troops held New York, and dur- 164 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES ing that time not a month, perhaps hardly a week, elapsed without some act of wanton destruction being wrought within the boundaries of the county, and when at the evacuation of New York by the British troops the remainder of the scat- tered inhabitants were enabled to settle down in peace to build up their homes and communities, they were without means and without credit. ‘The churches that they built then, after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, were such as they could construct with their own labor — the only thing they had left—and the many little churches which were erected in the county were of local materials and local handiwork exclu- sively. Bergen County had its fields covered with red sand- stone boulders, said by geologists to have been left there by glacial drift, and as the first necessity in a farming country is to clear the fields, these stones were piled up for walls or used for dwellings. The stone was easily worked, durable, and excellent in color, so that it became the natural material for the early farm buildings and churches of the county, and, as was said before in speaking of the church at Hackensack, almost all of the early churches, including that at Schraalenburg, which were assisted by the Hackensack Church or were founded by some members of it, were built of this material, the stones being neatly squared and the principal facades at least well- faced. Lime being scarce and expensive, the walls were laid up in clay instead of mortar, and pointed up with lime on the outside to make them weatherproof. The stone was either EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 165 not big enough to cut for lintels or perhaps the difficulty of cutting and handling stone large enough for lintels prevented their use. At any rate, the openings were arched, usually with a pointed arch, and the jambs and arches of the windows were often built of brick bonded into the stonework of the wall, because of the ease with which brick arches could be formed. The towers were of stone surmounted either with a wooden spire or with a small wooden belfry, and while all of the mould- ings and ornaments of the Dutch work are of a type somewhat different from that of the Colonial work, in the churches es- pecially was the difference strongly marked, although the later churches resemble more clearly the Colonial of the other parts of the country than did the earlier ones. So similar are these buildings, scattered over an area of about a hundred and fifty square miles of New Jersey, that a single example has been thought sufficient to illustrate them all, and since none of them possessed an historical importance sufficient to differentiate it from the others, the one chosen was selected merely because of its size, preservation, and general typical appearance. The First Reformed Church at Schraalenburg, New Jersey, which was built in 1801, is very similar to the church at Hackensack, although it is somewhat larger and slightly better in detail. Trinity Church in Newark was built four years later, and while the body of the church resembles very closely the typical 166 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES New Jersey stone church as exemplified by the Schraalenburg Church, the First Presbyterian Church at Newark, and others illustrated in this volume, it is distinguished from them by an excellent portico and a very well designed tower. It is evidently an expression of the local architecture as influenced by the Episcopal churches in New York, and while the in- terior is not at all attractive, the exterior is surprisingly good, and one feels not at all disturbed at the variance of styles in the different parts of the building. Like the older churches of the type, the windows have pointed heads and pseudo- Gothic tracery of wood, a Classic cornice, and a Classic tower. The columns are light and excellent, made of cut brownstone; the body of the building and the tower of random ashlar; the spire and cornice of course being wood. At the time of this writing it seems to be unhappily likely that the youngest of the three old sister churches still existing in New York—St. John’s in Varick Street—will be destroyed. The indifference of the vestry of Trinity Church to the value of preserving an architectural monument of this character has been equalled only by that of the government of the city, and while both apparently feel in a half contemptuous way that it would be “nice” to preserve the building, they can see no very good reason why it should not be destroyed, rather than to pay the few thousand dollars necessary for its preservation. The church has, it is true, no very great historical importance; it was constructed in 1807 after designs by John McComb, ST. JOHN’s CHAPEL, VARICK STREET, NEW YORK CITY ALID WUOA MAN *STHdVHO s,NHof “LS WOMMALNI EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 167 the putative architect of the New York City Hall. It was built as a chapel of Trinity Church (and still remains so) to take care of what was then a fashionable residential district sur- rounding a private square, known as St. John’s Park, which was eventually sold to the New York Central Railroad, and has been for many years occupied by it as a freight ter- minal. The building is architecturally not quite so interesting as St. Paul’s, though rather better than St. Mark’s, and the narrow and crowded lot on which it stands, surrounded by tall office buildings, does not improve its appearance, and makes it almost impossible to photograph even as well as the poor illustration shown in this chapter. The tower is exceed- ingly tall, and rather heavy toward the top, but the porch is excellently designed, and the interior is extremely lovely. There have been fortunately no changes made in it, because the district has now become unfashionable, and it was not thought worth while to spend much money to house the small congregation remaining. Trinity Church has never found it difficult to support chapels in fashionable districts, nor to keep open meeting rooms in poorer ones, and the foolishly indiffer- ent policy which may permit this lovely and interesting histor- ical monument to be destroyed is all but incomprehensible to the architect who regards good design of a building in much the same light that he does good painting in a picture — but it has no commercial value. The First Reformed Church at New Brunswick, which was 168 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES built in 1812, is somewhat dissimilar from the earlier Dutch churches in that it has its gallery expressed in the exterior by two separate tiers of windows, circular headed, and the square stone tower is surmounted by a stepped wooden tower, also square, rather agreeable in spite of the monotonous repetition of motives in its three stages. It is perhaps the best in detail of all the Dutch Reformed churches, although, as has been said before, the churches of New Jersey are com- paratively dull and uninteresting, the serious efforts of a cheerful people. The congregation at New Brunswick was founded in 1703 as the Three Mile Run congregation, and was organized in its present form in April, 1717, when the first church was built. Needless to add, it was in this earlier edifice that George Washington worshipped, and not in the present one, as is averred by tradition. The Moravian Church at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was built in 1805, but is architecturally not worth illustrating. It is in a general way similar to the Home Moravian Church at Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and it is interesting to note that these two churches, built by settlers of common ancestry in widely removed localities, were influenced as to design, not by the work around them, but by that of their home country. The settlement at Bethlehem was founded in 1740 by Count Zinzendorf (who was a Bishop of the Moravian Church, although a Lutheran) as a missionary set- tlement, and the community soon became famous for the ex- EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 169 cellence of its hospital. There Lafayette went to be nursed for a wound received in the Revolutionary War; and it was among the Moravians that Count Pulaski recruited a troop of horses for the Continental service, in spite of the pacific nature of the community. The settlement is more picturesque than the church, which is a large, badly shaped, two-story, barnlike structure of red brick with a small circular shaped cupola. It is extraordinary to find a building so completely Colonial in feeling erected as late as 1835, but the church at Tappan is quite similar in many respects to any of the eighteenth cen- tury buildings, although the Colonial type was at the end of the first third of the nineteenth century practically extinct. It is probable that this was due to the fact that it was copied very closely from the Cedar Street Presbyterian Church in New York City, long since destroyed, and that no architect was employed, the drawings having been made by John Haring, a carpenter-architect, and William Ackerman, the mason, both local men, whose descendants are still living in Tappan. The town is an old one as towns go in America, the first settlement there having been made -in 1640 by Cap- tain David Petersen de Vries, who bought five hundred acres of land, practically the whole present town of Tappan, from the Indians on April 15th of that year. He called the place Vriesendaal, and gathering together some settlers started a little town there, but the Indians, believing in the principles of referendum and recall, exercised these principles in 1643 by 170 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES driving the settlers out (unharmed), and it was not until more than twenty years afterward that a permanent settlement was made. The first church edifice was built in 1716 and enlarged in 1778, and, after being injured by fire, the present building was erected in 1835. ‘Some attempt was made appar- ently by the congregation to repair the old building enough to use it, which did not please the pastor at all, although in most cases where repairing was necessary it seems to have been the congregation which took the initiative. A very old gentleman, who is still alive, remembers at the beginning of the movement to build a new church at Tappan, there was a sermon preached by the then pastor, the Reverend Mr. Lan- sing, from the text: “Is it time for you, oh, ye, to dwell in your ceiled houses, and this house of God to lie waste?”” The congregation felt it was not time, and the church was built im- mediately thereafter. Historically the Tappan church has little of interest. The most famous event which ever occurred in the town was the execution of Major André during the Revolutionary War, when Washington’s headquarters were in the village. The First Presbyterian Church at Sag Harbor, Long Island, should not properly be included in this volume at all, since it is not Colonial, nor has it venerable historic associations, but as it is one of the very, very few of the surviving monu- ments of the brief “Egyptian Revival,” and as it is the only church in the writer’s knowledge which was executed in that style, it seems worth while including as a curiosity, if for no THE FIRST REFORMED CHURCH, NEW BRUNSWICK, N. J. Agsuaf MAN SHOIMSNNUG MAN ‘HOUNHO GIWUOATU Lsuld AHL ‘YOIMALNI EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 171 other reason; it is, besides, a tremendously clever piece of design —a tour de force of such amazing ingenuity that the tempta- tion to illustrate it is too strong to be resisted. The nineteenth century was remarkable for its ill-digested bites of historic architectural plums, and, curiously enough, while the Egyptian Revival enjoyed but the briefest possible vogue, and the style itself would seem to be one of the last adapted to American needs and conditions, the few pieces of design which were exe- cuted in it were really of quite extraordinary merit. One need only recall the Bryant Park Reservoir, the Essex County Court House at Newark, and the old Tombs Prison, all three now destroyed, to realize that these were all excellent pieces of design and of curious suitability to their purposes. None of them, of course, presented so difficult a problem as this church, since the Egyptians were practically without towers, and completely without spires, and the designer of this church was forced to combine Neo-Grec motives into a spire of pseudo-Colonial shape and attach it to the pair of Egyp- tian pylons which formed the facade. It is perhaps the most extraordinary combination ever attempted, except in fun, but the result is very far from being a joke, and even approximates good architecture, since the proportions are admirable and the detail interesting. The interior is hard, dry Greek Revival, but rather well proportioned, and with the motives even better adapted to their locations than in many better designed structures. 172 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES The oldest Presbyterian Church at Sag Harbor was built on the site of the present building in 1817, and was a small, temporary structure; the congregation at once began to collect material for a new and larger building, which was stored on the church property surrounding the church. All of this stored material and the old church were destroyed together by what is known in the village history as “The Great Fire.” ‘The present edifice was built in 1843-44, and no architect properly so-called was employed, but the design was a result of the serious efforts of four men employed on the building. Mr. Bellows was the builder in charge, and was still living in 1912. The interior was altered from time to time between 1843-1910, but as the alterations were made, the material — with unusual thoughtfulness — was not destroyed, but was stored in the cellar, and in 1910 the church was put back in its original condition, the old material being used, so that at present the entire building is as originally constructed, except that the tower is shingled instead of being clapboarded. Curiously enough in its final form the spirit of the design re- sembles not so much traditional American architecture as the decadent Greeco-Egyptian, which we find in certain buildings of Pompeii, which were probably totally unknown to the designers, and it is to an architect especially a matter of interest to find in America in the middle of the nineteenth century a result similar to that found in the Roman town in the first century, and produced through nearly the same EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 173 causes, namely —the decadent combination of two foreign forms not thoroughly understood by the designers who em- ployed them. This concludes the list of churches which have been thought worth preservation through the medium of photographs or of brief historical and descriptive sketches, and while there may be, and very probably are, other churches worthy of inclusion in this series, very diligent search on the part of the writer has failed to reveal them. As to the churches which have been illustrated, the writer feels that the reasons for the use of certain of them can be disputed, for he realizes that the individual viewpoints of different men cover a wide range, but he has been encouraged to begin and proceed with this work by certain of his fellow-architects who have expressed themselves as strong believers in the utility of the volume both to designers and to those who are interested in the formative stage of American civilization. CHAPTER X ARCHITECTURAL DEVELOPMENT AS ILLUSTRATED IN THE CHURCHES F the reader feels that he has cause to complain that the l historical side of these churches has been too lightly dealt with and that thearchitectural side has been dwelt upon too long he should remember that it is the buildings themselves that are under discussion rather than the congregations which built them and which they continue to house. Again, the his- tory of each denomination in the United States has been very fully and carefully written, and the writer, therefore, has only selected such incidents from ecclesiastical histories as possess interest to the general reader, and which have some bearing through the forms of worship-upon the buildings in which these forms of worship were conducted. On the other hand, there has been no attempt, so far as the writer knows, to compose a history of American architecture, although a number of books have been published which have touched upon certain of its aspects, and as the early American churches ‘constitute the largest group of monuments of a single class which remain from the early years of our nation, and as it was upon the churches that our early builders and architects lavished their highest powers of design, the history of the early American churches 174 a if 1 THE OLD DUTCH CHURCH, TAPPAN, N. J. “f°N ‘NvddVL ‘HOUNHD HOLAd ad1o0 FHL ‘MOrdaiNt EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 175 will in itself illustrate pretty completely the development of our first national style. Now, let it not be thought that this early architecture of ours is by any means a negligible factor in the world’s art develop- ment. Its influence upon American art to-day is potent and far-reaching, and has even been reflected back upon the Euro- pean styles, so that we continually find in modern European work traces of design which originated in the United States during the eighteenth century. Architectural writers both of our own country and of Europe have been too inclined to pass over the Colonial (or so-called American Georgian) architecture as but a pale and poor imitation of the European styles which existed concurrently with it, and they have expressed a con- temptuous surprise that in a new country architectural de- signers should have been content to follow precedents estab- lished in the Old World without endeavoring to develop an original style. With these views the writer cannot sympa- thize, since if by an “‘original style’’ of architecture is meant one which bears no traces or reminiscences of the Greek or Gothic, American designers would have had to accomplish a feat un- precedented in the history of art; they would have had to forget two thousand years of inherited tradition, and begun where the cave-dwellers of Europe began agés ago; since while a single memory of the mechanical improvements which have been made since the days of the cave-dwellers persisted, the forms in which these were expressed would likewise have persisted. 176 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES Had we been red Indians we might have developed an autoch- thonous architecture, as they did, but we were transplanted Europeans, as incapable of forgetting the traditions of our races as were those Europeans who never left their native lands. Yet, in the only sense in which it was possible for us to develop a new style, such a style was at once developed. The Colonial architecture of America is as different from English Georgian as the Georgian is from the Italian styles of the same period. We use, it is true, the Classic order as its basis. We could not have done otherwise, for there must be something in the Classic order inherently appropriate to the decoration and construction of buildings of all classes to have compelled twenty centuries of architects to make it the dominant factor in their designs, and as the difference between the great schools of Greece and Rome and of the Renaissance consists, namely, in the variation of methods of using the order, so American Colonial may be distinguished from other historical schools by the manner of its use. Our early settlers did not possess the means sufficient to con- struct buildings of large size and of costly materials, but in the small structures which they erected, and especially in the churches, we find the national style clearly differentiated from that of every country of Europe, and of no less merit. Influenced, it certainly was, by the racial characteristics of its users, yet it was essentially a national style, since while the Dutch churches of New Jersey, the Lutheran churches of Ta eer -4-~e« THE FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SAG te HARBOR, NEW YORK HUYOA MIN “MOdUVH Ovs ‘HOUNHO See SAW XK NVIUVSALAGSAUd LSUId AHL SVQ7 CQ MOIMALNI SS Se SSS ~ EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 177 Pennsylvania, and the English churches of New England have marked points of difference from each other, they still possess points of resemblance far more marked than those differences, and are easily to be distinguished from the work of any Euro- pean country. The characteristic of the style is (by com- parison with European work of the same period) a greater dependence upon line and mass than upon ornament, which was sparingly introduced and never permitted to dominate. The best American architecture of to-day has not dissimilar characteristics, and, wherever the early churches can be criti- cised, it is invariably on the ground of over-severity and ex- tenuation of the line, and never because of vulgarity and ostentation. Compare them, for example, with the Barocque churches of Europe which were erected at the same time, and you will find them to shine out like the water of a mountain brook in a muddy river. It has lately become the fashion, especially in the West, to criticise American architecture for its dependence upon the Classic orders, and to assert, with considerable vigor and some semblance of good reasoning, that there has been recently developed a national style which the Westerners choose to call the “style of the Western plains.”’ This architecture has not met with general acceptance in the East because it has re- jected, as far as possible, the Classic order, but the men who work in this style appear to believe that it is the American school for which we have been so long hoping, forgetting, ap- 178 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES parently, that it is only a part of the same art movement which is called the modern German style in Germany, and Art Nou- veau in France and Austria. Had our ancestors even con- sidered the desirability of discarding the Classic order, they would never have designed along these lines, because the “style of the Western plains”’ is an evolution, as has been every other art movement of the least importance, and a hundred years ago the forces which produced it did not exist. No group of men can sit down and, by a mere process of willing, evolve a new thing. They can only hope to change the old motives in accordance with their personal characteristics and the view- point of their times. Thus far, at least, the architects of the Colonial period did progress, since they showed a surprising ingenuity in the use and application of those architectural elements and forms which were known to them. Our early American buildings, and the text-books of the carpenters who constructed them, are filled with detail both animated and vigorous, variants of the Classic order before unheard of, and which yet somehow preserve the vital constructive qualities of the order, although the unessential features have been treated with a freedom which is outside the bent of the present generation. We are, for one thing, too well trained; in our school days we acquired a reverence for Vignola which we hardly accord to the Bible, and the use of the Corinthian order with triglyphs and mutules — not infrequent in Colonial work — is now regarded as much an offence against taste as it is an EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 179 indication of ignorance. To the architects of the Colonial days triglyphs had no God-given union with the Doric column which it behooved no man to sunder. They regarded any entablature as applicable (with the necessary changes in pro- portion) to any column, and proceeded to decorate their friezes and soffits as it pleased them and as agreed with their sense of the appropriate, regardless of the defined propriety of Vignola. It is not infrequent to find in Colonial buildings mutules with holes bored in them instead of pegs projecting from them, and sometimes these holes are arranged so as to form amusing patterns of black dots on the bottoms of the mutules. To the modern architect this is vicious if not criminal, and he con- tinues to use pegs (or gutta) on the bottoms of the mutules as if they had some structural significance and he knew what it was. Yet the very origin of this particular form of decoration of the Doric order has been so completely lost that it is merely a matter of conjecture, although evidently a development from some wooden form. The Colonial architects were indif- ferent as to its origin, and likewise indifferent to its historic connection, but they cared very much for its possibilities as a decorative treatment, and because they regarded architec- tural forms purely from an esthetic point of view, and not at all from a traditional one, we find that the decorative features of Colonial architecture have an indubitable quality of fitness to their location which cannot be imitated with a strict regard to tradition. 180 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES There has been, perhaps, no other period in which Classic forms were so freely used as in the Colonial days, except by the Greeks, and the Greek period was essentially one of develop- ment when no fixed canons as to proportion or as to sequences of mouldings had been established. Perhaps something of the same conditions which produced the excellence of the Greek detail was operative in the Colonial times; during both periods the architects were compelled to invent forms of de- tail because there were not a sufficient number of precedents at hand to copy from, and while during the Colonial period our architects freely resorted to Europe for the motifs for their buildings, it must not be supposed that they possessed meas- ured drawings of-the detail with sufficient exactness to follow, and these they necessarily devised for themselves. We have found, for example, that several of the American churches are reported to have been copies of St. Martin’s-in-the-fields in London, and that St. Philip’s Church in Charleston was copied from a church of the Jesuits in Antwerp. Had we not been informed that these were precedents, we would hardly have guessed that this was the fact, so great are the differences in both detail and proportion, the composition alone being similar. Their designers had probably only poor drawings or bad wood cuts to follow, which in themselves gave a false im- pression of the masses of the old churches; besides this, as every architect knows, it is very difficult to copy a building with any degree of exactitude from a perspective drawing EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 181 alone. The working drawings must be made in elevation, and there is an inevitable tendency to copy in the working drawings and direct elevations the proportions as shown in the perspective, without due allowance for the effects of perspec- tive. Any measured drawing, for example, of a spire, will, by comparison with a photograph of the same spire, appear tre- mendously attenuated, and when we add to these reasons the personal equation of the designer, who will instinctively alter proportions to fit his own sense of rectitude, the reasons for the development in the American school are to some degree comprehensible. : The indifference to tradition manifested Gecatiaa 4 the Colonial period is apparent in even the earliest of the remain- ing churches. St. Luke’s at Smithfield, for example, has pseudo-Classical pediment over the entrance door of a building otherwise distinctly reminiscent of the Gothic, and from that first church, on through the succession of buildings illustrated in this volume, one finds a happy freedom from the hampering limitations of tradition, partly forced, since the American builder could not run around the corner and copy a cornice from a church built there the year before by some other man; partly instinctive, since the inventive faculty in the Ameri- can people is so dominant as to be almost the genius of our nation. As in architecture, so in the forms they used for worship and in the government of their churches were the Colonials forced 182 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES to think for themselves, and with every sect which has gained a foothold in the United States do we find the same ability and willingness to strike out in new directions, from the “Americanism” of the Catholic Church to the Hicksite dogmas of the Quakers. This has been due partly to circumstances and partly to the restless and unsatisfied habit of mind which brought our ancestors to America, and which has been inherited from them. In New England, as long as the Puritans could get ministers ordained by the Church of England who were willing to serve in Puritan parishes in accordance with the dictates of these parishes, regardless of any conflict with the parental authority of the church, they continued to seek for them, but when the supply was exhausted because of the de- cline of the Puritan movement in England, they invented a new ordination of their own, and the Congregational method of church government was automatically begun. In the South, where the settlers with seeming content continued to draw their ministers from the Episcopal Church in England, they found themselves so far removed in point of space and time from the central authorities in England that they took into their own hands the regulation of their ecclesiastical affairs to a degree never before considered in England, and dominated the ecclesiastic government by the civil power. This was not so difficult as on its face it appears to be, since while in England the authorities of the town and of the parish were distinct officers, the same men not infrequently held both positions, EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES 183 and the boundaries of the town and parish were usually co- terminous, and while in New England the boundaries, the title, and the officers of the parish alike became extinct, in Virginia and the South the parish and the parish officers became the civil authority to the exclusion of the town and its officers. During the hundred and forty years that have elapsed since the Revolution religious sentiment in the United States has been by no means dormant. Many new sects have arisen, and two of them became factors to be reckoned with in the social and political life of the nation. We refer, of course, to the Mormons and the Christian Scientists. On the other hand, with the upspringing of new religions, there has been an equally powerful current tending to consolidate the older sects so that the differences between the various Protestant sects, and even between them and the Catholic Church, are to-day rather of the letter than of the spirit, and there is at the present time a powerful influence at work tending to unite the various Protestant denominations, which have thus far been deterred from consolidation only by minor and perhaps unimportant questions of church government and the acceptance of the various forms of ordination, confirmation, etc., by some of the sects. Eventually such a union must be, and when it occurs and all the churches are working together under a single cove- nant, broad enough to permit differences of practice, we may look for the early American churches to be filled again with the religious fervor which causedthem to be constructed. To- 184 EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES day we have the broad spirit of charity which was to them only a form of words, and which was, nevertheless, often beau- tifully expressed in their convenants, one of which required only that all members of the church should “have faith in the saving mercy of Christ Jesus our Lord.” APPENDIX TABLE OF EARLY AMERICAN CHURCHES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER Churches marked o are illustrated Dates given are those of the commencement of the structures. DATE TITLE ARCHITECT MATERIALS OBAP. - 01632 St. Luke’s, Smithfield, Va. Joseph Bridger Brick II 01681 “Ship Meeting House”, Hingham, Mass.. . . Wood II ~ 1692 Quaker Meeting House, Flushing, N. Y. : Wood Vv - 01697 ‘Gloria Dei,” ogee Paw .. Brick II 01698 Trinity, Wilmington, Del. Stone II 1698 Dutch Reformed Church, Oakland, N. J. Stone V 01700 St. Peter’s, New Kent Co., Vas = @ ae % Will Hughes Brick I 1706 Yeocomico Church, West- moreland Co., Va. Brick IV 01710 Bruton Parish Church, Williamsburg, Va. Alex. Spotswood Brick IV 1714 St. Michael’s, Marblehead, Mass. ‘ Wood III ~1715 St. David’s, Hida, Pa, : Stone Vv 1721 Dutch Reformed Church, Wyckoff, N. J. : Stone V ~- 01723 Old North, Boston, Mass. . William Price Brick III ~ 01726 Trinity, Newport, R.I.. Harrison (?) Wood Ii 185 186 DATE 01726 1726 01727 01730 01731 1732 1734 01735 1737 1739 1741 1748 01752 ~ 01753 01756 ~ 01758 1761 - 01761 1761 01763 APPENDIX TITLE Dutch Reformed Church, Hackensack, N. J. First Church, Saybrook, Ct. Christ Church, Philadel- phia, Pa. Old South, Boston, Mass. ‘ Tennent Church, Freehold, N. J. Christ Church, Tae: Va. St. Thomas, Bath, N : C. St. Paul’s, Edenton, N.C. . Blandford Church, Peters- burg, Va. St. Paul’s, Norfolk, Va. St. John’s, Richmond, Va. St. George’s, Schenectady, iy a ee St. Michael’s, Charleston, BGe i a es King’s Chapel, Boston, Mass. : St. Paul’s Chapel, Ny York, N. Y. St. Peter’s, Philadelphia, Pa. Christ Cinch Cambridge, Mass. Holy Trinity, Tesasavbar Pa. ; Meeting House, Wethers- field, Ct. First Church, Dedham, Mass. ‘ ARCHITECT John Kearsley Robert Twelves Thos. Ravenscroft Gibson Peter Harrison Macbean Samuel Rhodes Peter Harrison MATERIAIS CHAP. Stone Wood Brick Brick Wood Brick Brick Brick Brick Brick Wood Stone Stucco Stone Stone Brick Stone Brick Wood Wood Vv Il Vv Il 3244 4 243 Til iil III DATE 01764 - 01765 1767 01769 1770 01771 1775 - o1TT5 o1787 1787 1788 01788 1789 01791 1794 01795 1799 - 01800 01801 APPENDIX TITLE St. Paul’s Church, East Chester, N. Y. — Christ Church, Alexandria, Va. By clit) ae Meeting House, Long- Meadow, Mass. . Pohick Church, Va. Palatine Church, Mohawk Valley Meeting House, ee ton, Ct. Jewish Synagogue, Nee port, R. I. : First Baptist, Pesci deiices R. I. First Presbyterian, Ree N.J. . First Church, Enfield, Mass, Congregational § Church, Southampton, Mass. Home Moravian Church, Winston-Salem, N. C. First Presbyterian, Eliza- beth, N. J. First Presbyterian, Gori: field, N. J. . Meeting House, East Had- dam, Ct. : St.Mark’s, New York, N. Y. Meeting House, West Springfield, Mass. Independent Presbyterian, Savannah, Ga. First Reformed, Schraalen- berg N. J. : ARCHITECT James Wren George Washington Judah Woodruff Peter Harrison Joseph Brown Jay (?) 187 MATERIALS CHAP. Stone Vv Brick IV Wood sid Brick IV Stone v Wood Ii Wood ‘Ill Wood =I Stone Vv Wood = ‘Ill Wood III Brick IV Stone Vv Wood Vv Wood =idTiI Stone Vv Wood sii Marble VIII Stone IX 188 DATE 1805 01805 01805 01806 01806 01807 01807 01807 - 01809 01810 1811 01812 “01812 01812 1812 01812 01815 01816 01818 APPENDIX TITLE Moravian Church, Beth- lehem, Pa. Trinity Church, Newark, N. J. Congregational Lenox Mass. First Church, Hartford, Ct. First Church, Bennington, Vt. Beneficent, Providence, R. L St. John’s Chapel, New York, N. Y. 3 St. John’s, N. H. Park Street, Boston, Mass, Meeting House, oe Mass. New North Church, Bos- ton, Mass. Monumental Church, Rich- mond, Va. Centre Church, New Haven, Ct. North Church, New Haven, Church, Portsmouth, Ct. Ss: ete Trinity Church, New Haven, Ct. First Reformed Church, New Brunswick, N. J. First Church, Lyme, Ct. . Hill Church, Dorchester, First Church, Springfield, Mass. es Uke Gace. ARCHITECT Daniel Wadsworth Asher Benjamin John Green John McComb Peter Banner Charles Bullfinch Charles Bullfinch Robert Mills Ithiel Town David Hoadly David Hoadly Isaac Damon MATERIAIS CHAP, Brick Stone Wood Wood Wood Wood Stone Brick Brick Brick Wood Stone Brick Brick Brick Stone Wood Wood Wood Ha sS kB bd VII vil VIII SH” S 3 A VII VII DATE 01819 01819 01820 01824 01829 1829 ~ 01835 01835 01848 APPENDIX TITLE Meeting House, East mt Ct. ‘ St. Paul’s, Augusta, Ga. Meeting House, Ware, Mass. First Unitarian Church, Deerfield, Mass. First Church, Guilford, Ct. Second Church, Hartford, ct... 3 St. Philip’s, Charleston, §8.C. .. First Church, Tigo, N. y. First Presbyterian Church, Sag Harbor, N. Y. ARCHITECT Isaac Damon Isaac Damon (?) J. Hyde John Haring Bellows (?) MATERIALS Wood Brick Wood Brick Wood Wood Stucco Brick Wood 189 VII Vil VI VI Vill IX Tx THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. ¥.