about the New Jersey Churchscape website


No. 71 September 2008 The authoritative source on early churches of New Jersey ISSN 1543-3250 About this site We've created a database and photographic inventory on more than half the 18th & 19th century churches in the state and add to it each month. We welcome and solicit all contributions and suggestions from our visitors. *Find a church* photo gallery index to the articles *How to use this site* Architects & builders Consult the database Annotate the database Upload a photo Suggest a church for inclusion Glossary List of churches, by county Photographic notes Links to related sites	*About us* NewJersey Churchscape was developed and is maintained by Frank L. Greenagel, author of The New Jersey Churchscape: Encountering the 18th and 19th Century Churches, published by Rutgers University Press. His work on the old churches of Hunterdon County was honored by the Hunterdon County Planning Board's annual Donald Jones Award in 2000. Dr. Greenagel has been photographing the churches of New Jersey for the last nine years, and speaks often on the topic to historic and preservation groups. He is the author of the article on religious architecture in the Encyclopedia of New Jersey, and of an article on Methodist churches in New Jersey History (Spring/Summer 2004). Greenagel is readying several new books—a photographic inventory of the 18th and 19th century religious architecture of Hunterdon, Burlington, Cumberland, Mercer, Monmouth, Morris, Warren, and Sussex counties, and hopes eventually to finish a complete inventory for every county. The Somerset book, titled Historic Churches of Somerset County, New Jersey, was published a year ago, the Warren county book, The Warren Churchscape, and the book on the old churches of Sussex County are now available from Amazon. In August, the work on Hunterdon county will be published (he hopes). His book on photography, Think Like a Photographer, was published by Mondo Publishing. After a couple of decades as a book publisher, he is in the process of setting up his own publishing firm, The Wooden Nail Press; watch for an announcement next month. He can be reached at or occasionally at (908) 627-1234. In real life, Dr. Greenagel is Managing Director of Guided Learning Systems, a consultancy on technology-based learning systems and instructional design. He is also developing a series of virtual apprenticeships in marketing, teaching, and web competencies; information is available at WiredSeminars. You can find more on his approach to photography and education at the website, www.thinklikeaphotographer.com. Technical advisor for the site is William P. Woodall, an adjunct faculty member at Raritan Valley Community College. (wpw@woodall.com) We rely heavily on the county histories, published in the 1880s, for dates and other details, in full knowledge that the data there is maddingly incomplete and not infrequently, inaccurate. An invaluable corrective is the local knowledge that our readers bring to us, often with a personal reminiscence of a connection to the church, or even of a parent or other ancestor who preached at one or more of the churches. Before that information is lost to the public record, one of our aims is to incorporate much of it into the materials we include about each church. We are still (now five years after we started) learning the kinds of information that would be useful—the exact address of each church and any published work on the congregation— which we will gradually begin to incorporate into these articles. This website uses the term churchscape to encompass not only the scale, design, materials and setting, but the denomination of the original church and their successors; it includes the architectural, cultural and religious traditions associated with the church and the region. We accept no advertising and we are not funded by any grants or subsidies. The effort involved is not the fabled "labor of love" (although it is a considerable source of satisfaction), but rather an opportunity to make available a large corpus of material that otherwise might lie unused, and to experiment with a variety of tools and functions in an attempt to learn how to use the web to build a broad resource around a rather narrowly-focused topic. The upshot is that the site may undergo considerable change, experimentation and adaptation as we get feedback and gain experience.
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