Immanuel Congregational Church, Hartford (1899)

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While the Gothic style was used extensively in the nineteenth century and continues to be popular for churches, by the end of the century there was a general return to classicism and a growing interest in colonial architecture. The Immanuel Congregational Church, on Farmington Avenue, was built in 1899 in a style that drew on Roman and Byzantine antecedents and also reflected the Colonial Revival with its red brick and white trim. It was designed by Ernest Flagg, who was known for his neoclassical Beaux-Arts buildings. The church is located across the street from the Mark Twain House. Although the author was no longer residing in Hartford at the time, he still owned the house when the church was built, and referred to the new structure as the “Church of the Holy Oil Cloth” because of the green and yellow Byzantine tiles on the front elevation. These tiles proved so controversial they were plastered over and not uncovered again until the 1980s.

Immanuel Congregational Church is the successor to two earlier congregations. The older of the two was North Church, founded in 1824, and originally located on Main Street where the famous Horace Bushnell was the minister from 1833-1859. In 1867, the church moved to the corner of Asylum and High Street and was known as Park Church for its location across from Bushnell Park. Meanwhile, in 1852, Pearl Street Church had been founded. This congregation moved west and built the Farmington Avenue Church in 1899. It merged with Park Church in 1914 and the two congregations became one under the current name of Immanuel Congregational Church. The church also has a blog.

This concludes our week-long look at some nineteenth century Hartford churches. We began with the earliest Puritan congregations which, early in the century, produced meeting houses in the Federal style (Center Church, South Church). We then moved to the great popularity of the Gothic Revival style, popular with the Episcopal (Christ Church Cathedral) and Catholic (St. Peter’s Church) denominations, and also used by the Congregationalists (Asylum Hill Church). The use of the Gothic mode reached an artistic peak with Edward T. Potter’s High Victorian Gothic masterpiece, the Church of the Good Shepherd. And now we end our survey at the end of the century with the return to classicism represented by the Immanuel Congregational Church.

Church of the Good Shepherd, Hartford (1869)

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The history of Hartford is strongly connected to the activities of Sam Colt and the manufacturing of his famous firearms. Colt’s wife, Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt, was a philanthropist and patron of the arts. After the death of her husband in 1862, she commissioned the architect Frederick Clarke Withers, a partner of Calvert Vaux, to design an Episcopal church as a memorial to Sam Colt and four of their children, all of whom had died within a five-year period. The church would serve the Colt armory’s workers in the industrial district known as Coltsville. In 1866 she rejected Withers’s plans and instead turned to Edward Tuckerman Potter, the architect who would later design the Mark Twain House.

Completed in 1869, Potter’s polychromatic Church of the Good Shepherd is an excellent example of the High Victorian Gothic style. It has unique features, including crossed Colt pistols and revolver parts carved in sandstone around the south “Armorer’s Door.” It also has notable stained glass windows.

Asylum Hill Congregational Church (1865)

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As the nineteenth century progressed, the Gothic Revival style was frequently used for Episcopal and Catholic churches (note, for example, Christ Church Cathedral and St. Peter’s Church). Some Congregational churches were also built in that style, including the Asylum Hill Congregational Church, the only Gothic Congregational church in greater Hartford. which was built in 1865 and designed by Patrick Keely. A noted architect of Catholic churches, Keely would later design Hartford’s St. Joseph’s Cathedral, which was destroyed by fire in 1956.

The Asylum Hill Church’s first pastor was Joseph Twitchell, who was a good friend of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens). The Clemens family rented a pew in the church. Today the church is also known for its yearly Boar’s Head and Yule Log Festival.

Christ Church Cathedral (1828)

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Hartford’s fist Episcopal church was completed in 1795 and looked very similar to contemporary white Congregational meeting houses. Following the disestablishment of the Congregational Church as the official church of Connecticut in 1818 and the growth of the original Episcopal congregation, it was apparent by the 1820s that a larger building should be built. When Christ Church’s rector, Rev. Nathaniel S. Wheaton, was on a trip to England collect books for the Episcopalians’ new Washington College (now Trinity College), he sketched many of the Gothic churches there and, on his return, noted New Haven architect Ithiel Town was hired to design the new church in a Gothic Revival style. Town had previously designed Trinity Church on New Haven Green.

Christ Church was built in 1828 and consecrated in 1829. While the church’s overall shape still resembles a meeting house, by choosing a Gothic style the Connecticut Episcopalians were announcing their separate identity from the Congregationalists by linking themselves to the Anglican tradition. Various alterations have been made over the years by a number of noted architects. In 1919, the church was chosen to be the Cathedral of the Diocese of Connecticut. As the Cathedral is currently covered in scaffolding, the photo above focuses on the Bell Tower, which was added in 1838.

EDIT (5/30/08): I have replaced the original picture with a new one. There is still scaffolding, but more of the church is visible than in the first picture.

South Church, Hartford (1827)

The organization of Hartford’s Second Congregational Church occurred in 1670, after years of doctrinal disputes in the Hartford Church following the death of Thomas Hooker in 1647. After the division, the new congregation built its first meeting house in 1673, later replaced by its second in 1754. The current South Congregational Church on Main Street has a similar Federal style design to that of Center Church, also displaying the influence of James Gibbs, but here the spire is less elaborate, reflecting the popularity of the simpler Greek Revival style at the time it was built. The church is also unusual in having just a single row of windows on its side elevations. An article in the Hartford Courant noted the congregation’s 335th anniversary in 2005. Update 3/8/2012: Added new picture above. The old is here: (more…)

Center Church, Hartford (1807)

Having focused on houses for the last two weeks, HBCT now begins a week-long chronological survey of some nineteenth century churches in Hartford. These churches display the religious history and changing architectural styles of the period.

First up is Center Church, on Main Street. Built in 1807, it is the fourth meetinghouse building of the First Congregational Society. The Socirty was founded in Cambridge, Mass. in 1632 and was led to the west bank of the Connecticut River by its first minister, Rev. Thomas Hooker, in 1636. The town they founded was named Hartford, after Hertford in England. There was no separation of church and state at that time under the Puritan founders, so the church and government met in one and the same building. The first small meetinghouse was located near the current site of the Old State House, and it was there, in 1638, that representatives from the three original river towns of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfiled drew up the world’s first written constitution to create a government, the Fundamental Orders, adopted in 1639.

The second meeting house replaced the original log structure in 1641. For the third meeting house, in 1741, construction was moved down the street to the current location at Gold Street, on a corner of the Ancient Burying Ground. The fourth and final building was completed in 1807. By that time, church and government were using separate structures, hence the Old State House having been built at the site of the old meeting house in 1796.

Center, or First, Church, has a distinctive “wedding cake” style steeple, said to have been designed by Daniel Wadsworth, founder of the Wadsworth Atheneum. The steeple shows the elaborate ornamentation favored in America in the early decades of the nineteenth centry (called the Federal style). Wadsworth’s design, which is heavy with columns, displays this style to the extreme. Such steeples show the Baroque influence of architect James Gibbs, whose books influenced the designs of countless New England Churches. Wadsworth was said to be strongly inspired by Gibbs’s famous St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London.

Today, Hartford’s Center Church fetures such later additions as five stained glass windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The restoration and preservation of this historic structure has been a concern lately, as shown in a recent editorial in the Hartford Courant. Update 3/8/2012: Added new picture above. The old is here: (more…)