No. 45  March 2005
The authoritative source on early churches in New Jersey

ISSN 1543-3250

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Feature of the month

local and peculiar circumstances

The design of St. Paul's Methodist church in Port Republic (Atlantic) bears a strong resemblance to the Methodist church in Williamstown (25 miles away, in Gloucester County), erected in 1860, ten years before St. Paul's. In this case the line of influence can be traced with confidence—members of St. Paul's had cousins who were part of Williamstown's congregation, and when St. Paul's was ready to build a new church, the family suggested they model it after their cousins' building in Williamstown. They even arranged for St. Paul's to borrow the architectural plans of the earlier building.
     Determining why a building looks the way it does is rarely so neat or definitive. There are usually a variety of influences; for all we know the congregation's building committee might have been deeply divided about the style they wanted for their new church, as they often were about the location. An architectural historian's task (I assume, for I know little about the field) is not simply to put a date and label on the style of a building, but to explain something of why the church looks as it does, which is to say he or she ought to help us see the possible choices faced by the architect, contractor or building committee—to put that decision into an historical context and present any evidence that might have tilted the decision one way or another. In spite of all my digressions and dicta, that essentially is what I am trying to do in this website.
      At any date a few decades after initial colonization of the Jerseys, congregations had several alternative designs to choose from. The octangular plan of seventeenth century Dutch Protestants was used even by Quakers; the Wren-Gibbs Presbyterian and Anglican churches in Newark are sufficiently different to illustrate the choices made by dominant elites; south Jersey has a half dozen superb Georgian buildings that might have been constructed with help from builders whose fathers worked for Wren or Gibbs in London. Most rural congregations (which is to say almost all of the state) erected simple domestic meetinghouses, rather like a small barn or schoolhouse. By the start of the nineteenth century Washington, Baltimore, and New Haven had Gothic churches, and within a couple of decades we would find them in this state, too. By mid-century there was no design except Spanish colonial which might not be found here. The lack of an established church in the colony, the tolerance for a diversity of religious practices, and the multi-ethnic population explains much of the richly varied church architecture we have, but only in the broader cultural sense. It is of little use to us in explaining why a specific church looks the way it does.
     It must be abundantly clear that form does not follow function as far as houses of worship are concerned. The function of the meetinghouse has changed significantly since colonial days, but the forms have changed in ways that were largely independent of those functions. There are exceptions—the Sunday School movement and the Social Gospel attitude of the mid-nineteenth century gave rise to the inclusion of a ground floor for accommodating a multitude of meetings and group activities (relegating the sanctuary to the second floor), but for the most part, churches have vestigial appendages that no longer serve the original purpose: belfrys long ago ceased to summon the congregation, buttresses are false and irrelevant, and the separate entrances for men and women are now considered a safety feature to empty the building quickly in case of fire, or to provide ramp access in compliance with the ADA. More than anything else, the style, scale and location of the churches erected from the period of the Civil War on served to signal the community about the affluence, social standing, and taste of the congregation. But to know that still doesn't explain why the church looks as it does.
     Because most church histories do not discuss the issue—indeed they rarely mention an architect or builder, although they are generally precise about the cost of the building down to the penny—we have to infer from other evidence the answer to the question. In my view, there are five major determinants that factor into a church's design:

1.  National and denominational traditions, and liturgical considerations;
2.  Important national models, builders' guides & local contractors;
3.  Constraints imposed by the availability of artisans, materials and the
      financial resources of the congregation;
4.  Local models—the meme of an ideal church in the mind of the building
      committee and the congregation;
5.  Influential churchmen, donors, and architects, especially in the upscale
      churches.

I will touch on each of those matters briefly. I suggest that readers regard these as hypotheses rather than settled conclusions.

1.  National and denominational traditions, and liturgical
     considerations. Over the last four years in these pages I have made a case for Anglican's use of the Gothic, for adoption of the Wren-Gibbs model in Reformed congregations in the late eighteenth century and Greek Revival, especially in Somerset county in the middle of the nineteenth century. Presbyterian and Baptist congregations usually embraced whatever was fashionable, but until late in the nineteenth century seemed to avoid anything too popish or Anglican (i.e., Gothic). Until the mid-nineteenth century, Quakers stayed closed to the domestic style they brought with them from the English midlands, after which they moved ever so slightly in the direction of mainstream Protestant churches. As Methodist congregations drew increasingly from people of middle-class respectability their churches grew larger and more elaborate, often eclipsing any other denomination in town. When the Catholic church became the largest in the state following the Civil War, they invariably settled on some form of the Gothic, usually adopting European models rather than the late medieval English parish church of the Anglicans.

2. Important national models, including builders' guides and
     local contractors. I am increasingly of the opinion that local contractors, until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, played a most significant role in the design of a church. There are several examples of building committees who asked for a “neat and plain building in the Gothic mode,” or “in the modern style,” and left it up to the contractor, whose work they knew, to execute a design consistent with that general instruction. It appears that the specific design was worked out after the dimensions and cost had been agreed to, and many of the details of the steeple and the façade, for example, were probably worked out as construction progressed. A model, such as Boston's Old North Church or the George Street Methodist Church in Philadelphia, suitably scaled down to fit the resources of the congregation, would provide a general plan. Plan books issued by Downing, LeFevre, Upjohn, and others provided enough for an accomplished contractor to carry out a design more or less favorably, and Upjohn provided plans for simple wooden frame board-and-batten churches at exceptionally modest cost.

3. Church design was constrained by availability of skilled
     artisans, materials (until the 1850s) and the financial
     resources of the community. Until the railroads made shipment of stone and other construction materials cheap, there were financial limits to how a congregation might build. By mid-century, there were at least a hundred sash-and-blind manufacturers operating in the state, making elaborate doors, windows, brackets and other architectural details available at low cost. It appears to me that many of the Ionic capitals on the Greek Revival buildings, for example, were manufactured, not hand-carved on site. In the villages and hamlets, the skill of the local artisans was probably as much as limiting factor; someone could always be found who knew how to erect a barn-like meetinghouse, but anything much larger, or which placed an extraordinarily heavy load on the roof as a multi-tiered belfry-lantern-steeple might, was beyond the ability of the locals.

4. Local models—the meme of an ideal church in the mind of
     the building committee and the congregation. It is clear to me that certain churches were regarded widely as ideal models—the epitome of what a church should look like. The Presbyterian church in Westfield is one I often cite as the model for more than a dozen buildings in the central part of the state. The George Street Methodist church, the Reformed church in Hackensack, and the First Presbyterian church in Trenton were all widely copied models. A delegation of Quakers from Crosswicks visited several Pennsylvania meetinghouses before settling on the one from Buckingham as their choice, and the Crosswicks meetinghouse probably served, in turn, as a model for others.

5. Influential churchmen, donors, and architects, especially
     in the upscale churches. The engagement of an architect was not possible for smaller congregations, of course, but by the middle of the nineteenth century congregations with social or civic aspirations knew that a qualified architect was necessary if they were to realize their goal of erecting an important church. Anglican Bishop Doane was among the first in the state to do so, but Catholic parishes whose massive brick and stone edifices could not be designed or erected without professional help, were invariably assisted by highly accomplished architects who worked on a national scale. I suspect that Catholic bishops, one of whom was Doane's son, had a significant role in the selection of the architect rather than devolving that responsibility to the local parish priest.

Which of these factors were most important? That is difficult to say without additional information, which is usually missing from the printed record. Occasionally, we can make some reasonable inferences—St. Peter's church in Morristown dropped its original architect and engaged a member of the congregation, Charles McKim, one of the leading architects of the period. Given his status, it is reasonable to assume that he had friends on the vestry and the building committee; he had recently spent considerable time touring the Gothic structures of Europe, so I assume that he was consulted on the original plan, reacted negatively, and was asked to redesign the church. Builder Elijah Hopping designed three Presbyterian churches in 1834-35 in Whippany, East Hanover, and New Vernon; they are basically built to the same plan although the façades are different. Do we mark that up to Presbyterian tradition, personal contacts, or a low bid? Architect Oscar Teale probably designed more than one of the nabob's mansions in Plainfield, which I suspect lead to commissions to design three rather different churches in that city and in North Plainfield: German Reformed, Seventh Day Baptist and Unitarian. Beyond that, the answer to our question is probably unknowable.
      There are two Greek Revival churches in Chester (Morris). The Presbyterian church was built in 1851 in a design common to central Jersey—an in antis entry with two Ionic columns and four pilasters. The Congregational church was erected five years later with a full Doric portico, which is fairly unusual in the state although a similar design was erected in nearby Mt. Olive five years earlier. Rather than adopt the newly fashionable Gothic mode—an unconventional design for a Congregational body with roots in New England—the church chose to stick with Greek Revival, but insisted, I surmise, that their church had to be different from the Presbyterian one. Predictable? Not necessarily; there are a dozen congregations within 15 miles of Somerville that built essentially identical Greek Revival churches within a few years of each other.
     “Most buildings still sufficiently follow broader cultural impulses that they can readily be seen as possessing an identifiable style common to other buildings in the period,” notes architectural historian Mark Gelernter. So the point is that although we must understand the history of major architectural traditions if we would understand our own churchscape, there are local and peculiar circumstances that may influence why a particular style was chosen, or how that particular style was employed. It may be that the most interesting story lies in the local and peculiar, if we can discover it.

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