First Church Congregational, Fairfield (1892)

Fairfield‘s First Church Congregational has had six successive church buildings, the third having been destroyed when the British burned Fairfield in 1779 and the fifth burned down, apparently due to an arsonist, the night before Memorial Day in 1890. As described by Frank Samuel Child in An Old New England Church (1910):

The first Meeting-House was a small, rude building made of logs and rough hewn timbers, probably erected in 1640. Town meetings as well as church services were held in it. The second Meeting-House was built in 1765—a larger and more comfortable structure —a frame building forty feet square clapboarded, and a tower in the center of the roof. The third Meeting-House was reared in the year 1745—sixty feet in length, forty-four feet in breadth, twenty-six feet in height, with a spire one hundred and twenty feet. The Rev. Andrew Eliot called it an “elegant Meeting-House.” The fourth Meeting-House was modeled after the one destroyed in 1779. The congregation worshipped in it for the first time March 26th, 1786, but it was forty-two years before it was properly finished—a fact which suggests the slow recovery of the people from the losses of the American Revolution. A part of the funds came from the town and the confiscated property of traitors and a part from the subscriptions of the people. The Meeting-House erected in 1849 was the first one that came as the result of voluntary offerings. More than eight thousand dollars was raised for this Romanesque structure. The length of it was ninety-five feet and its breadth forty-seven. The spire extended to the height of one hundred and thirty feet. The seating capacity of this handsome Meeting-House was five hundred and fifty persons. The later changes adapted the structure to the needs of the day—a chapel being added during the pastorate of Dr. McLean and the church parlors when Dr. Bushnell was pastor.

The current church was completed in 1892 and has Tiffany windows.

Wapping Community Church (1801)

The Church in Wapping, a section of South Windsor, was built in 1801 and initially served several denominations. The Baptists and Methodists later founded their own churches, so that by 1817, only the Congregationalists remained. They eventually organized as the Second Congregational Church in South Windsor in 1830. The Congregationalists later merged with the Methodists to found the Wapping Federated Church, which became the Wapping Community Church in 1936. The original appearance of the church is not known. It was altered to its current Greek Revival style in 1849.

Mohegan Congregational Church (1831)

On Church Lane in Uncasville near the Tantaquidgeon Museum is the Mohegan Congregational Church. In 1827, land for the church was deeded to the Mohegan Tribe by Lucy Occom Tantaquidgeon, her daughter Lucy Tantaquidgeon Teecomwas, and her granddaughter Cynthia Teecomas Hoscoat. Their friend, missionary Sarah Huntington of Norwich, raised funds and opposed the relocation of the Mohegans during the era of Indian Removal, inspiring her relative, Congressman Jabez W. Huntington, to support the Tribe’s right to remain in Connecticut. The completion in 1831 of a Christian church played an important role at the time in preventing the removal of the Mohegans from their traditional lands. More recently, proof that the church property was the only plot of land that remained continuously owned by the Tribe was a critical factor in the reinstatement of federal recognition in 1994. With new funds, the Mohegan Tribe has restored the church, which has been for so long been a center of tribal political, social, and cultural life.

Church of Christ Congregational of Norfolk (1813)

Rev. Joseph Eldridge describes the erection of the first meeting house in Norfolk in the History of Norfolk (1900):

In dimensions it was fifty feet by forty, and of suitable height for galleries, without a steeple. In 1759, two years previous to the settlement of Mr. [Ammi Ruhamah] Robbins, [Norfolk’s first minister, who also served as an army chaplain during the Revolutionary War] the house was raised and covered. In 1761, the year of his ordination, it was underpinned and the lower floor laid. Such was its condition when he was ordained in it. In 1767 the gallery floor was laid; 1769 the lower part of the house and the pulpit were finished. January 2, 1770, it was, in the words of the time, dignified and seated; that is, the places to be occupied by those of various ages determined, and individuals located in them, as is done now. The next year the galleries were completed, and a cushion for the pulpit procured. The outside was painted the color of a peach blossom.

This meeting house, which was painted white in 1793, was taken down in 1813 and a new meeting house, designed by David Hoadley, was constructed. As Frederic S. Dennis explains, in The Norfolk Village Green (1917):

in 1814 the second Meeting House was finished, 60 by 45 feet in dimensions, and with a steeple and bell. This was built near the site of the original and was erected under the supervision of Michael F. Mills, who was appointed as agent by the society to build the best house he could for $6,000. It is still in existence; but after the death of Rev. Joseph Eldridge [in 1875] the interior was beautifully decorated and painted, a new platform and pulpit erected, electric lights installed, a new organ donated, Munich stained glass windows placed behind the pulpit, all through the great generosity of the Eldridge and Battell families.

As Dennis further writes:

The Meeting House as it now stands is a model of colonial church architecture. Its symmetry, its proportions, its graceful steeple, its artistic Sir Christopher Wren spire, its site on the knoll overlooking the Green, its beautiful interior decoration, its magnificent organ, make it one of the most attractive and beautiful in New England. One feature is most unusual to find in a Congregational church, a cross at the apex of the spire. It is “the only Puritan Meeting House whose spire from the first was surmounted by a cross and the same cross still points skyward.” This cross was evidently placed on the steeple in [1814] according to dates found in Rev. Thomas Robbins‘s diary.

Nineteenth-century Italianate alterations to the front facade of the Church of Christ Congregational of Norfolk were removed in 1926 and replaced with the current two-story pillared front porch, the gift of Alice Eldridge Bridgman, completed in 1927.

First Church of Winsted (1891)

The Ecclesiastical Society of Winsted was established in 1778. The name “Winsted” was a combination of the names of the two neighboring towns, Winchester and Barkhamsted, from among whose residents the new society was formed. After some debate, the first meeting house was built between the societies of Winchester and Barkhamsted, near the east-west road between the residence of Harris Brown and the Old Country Road in the Wallens Hill section of the village. With the population soon shifting away from Wallens Hill, a new and larger church was built on the East End Green in 1800. This structure served the congregation until a new church, constructed of granite, was dedicated in 1901. In 1949, the First Congregational and First Baptist churches were merged and the united congregation was called the First Church (Baptist and Congregational). After the Flood of 1955 damaged both the First and Second churches, a merger of these two congregations occurred in 1957, with the new Church of Christ (Baptist and Congregational) utilizing the Second Church building. 119 members of the First Congregational Church, fearing their old church would no longer be used for worship, broke from the new federation and, since 1958, the First Church of Winsted has continued as a separate congregation.

Whitneyville Congregational Church (1834)

The Whitneyville Congregational Church was built in 1834 in the manufacturing village of Whitneyville, in Hamden. The congregation began as the East Plains Congregational Church in 1795. It’s original meetinghouse on Dixwell Avenue was replaced by a new church, built after much debate, in a new location, next to the Cheshire Turnpike (now Whitney Avenue), on land donated by the widow of Eli Whitney. The Greek Revival structure was inspired by the designs of architect Ithiel Town. The church was enlarged by Rufus G. Russell, a former assistant of Henry Austin, with a pulpit recess in 1867. The dome atop the steeple was added by the end of the nineteenth century.

Harwinton Congregational Church (1952)

Harwinton’s first Congregational meeting house was constructed in the early 1740s, to the south of where the current Congregational Church now stands. Surplus materials from its construction were later used to build the town’s first schoolhouse. Put to municipal use for thirty years after a new church was built in 1808, the old structure became dilapidated and was eventually torn down. The 1808 church, built in the Federal style, continued in use until it burned, after being struck by lightning, in 1949. Groundbreaking ceremonies for a new church occurred the following year and the building opened for worship in 1952. Due to a shortage of funds, the new church remained without a steeple for ten years, until 1962, when the Harwinton Congregational Church acquired the steeple of the Methodist Church in Torrington, which was being torn down at the time.