Trinity Episcopal Church, Newtown (1870)

In 1732, Newtown’s Congregational minister, Rev. John Beach, converted to the Anglican Church and traveled to Scotland to be ordained. He then returned to Newtown, where the town’s Anglicans built a small church near the corner of Main Street and Glover Avenue. Its location was marked in 1907 by a memorial tablet. A larger church was built on Main Street in 1746, followed by a third building, formally named Trinity Church and consecrated in 1793 by Bishop Samuel Seabury. The current church was built in 1870. As explained in Newtown’s History and Historian, Ezra Levan Johnson (1917):

In 1866, the parish bought the homestead of Isaac Beers, just south of the old church and separated from it by a branch road connecting at the rear of the Church with the road leading to Sandy Hook. The town relinquished its right to this road. The strip of road, together with the homestead bought of Isaac Beers, made ample room for the site and building of the new Church, without disturbing the old Church building. After the completion of the stone Church, the old building was sold at auction for $100 and torn down. […] The architect was Mr. Silas Norman Beers, one of Newtown’s gifted sons. He, with Mr. Henry Sanford [a merchant] and others of the committee, gave time and strength in unstinted measure to the work, and it was a proud day in February, 1870, that saw the completion of the fourth Church edifice since the first Rector, Rev. John Beach, preached his first sermon in 1732 under the button-ball tree at the four corners below the Street.