Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Peter
Encyclopedia
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Peter, known locally as the Old Stone Church, is located on US 9 in the Town of Rhinebeck
, New York
, United States
. It is a stone church built in the late 18th century by the area's Palatine German immigrant population. It has been renovated significantly since then. The church congregation was established in 1729.
Worshippers at first were those who farmed the surrounding areas, but as the nearby villages of Rhinebeck
and Red Hook
grew and Lutheran
churches were established there, the local congregation dwindled. Today only quarterly meetings are held. In 1975 it and the accompanying parsonage (now home to the Museum of Rhinebeck History) and schoolhouse were listed on the National Register of Historic Places
(NRHP).
. It is midway between the villages of Rhinebeck and Red Hook, on a gentle rise in the land.
The main building, the church, is directly opposite the junction with Stone Church Road. It is a three-by-five-bay
fieldstone
two-and-a-half-story edifice with a four-story tower in its southeast corner. The east and west walls are fenestrated
with high round-arched glass windows trimmed in brick. The main entrance is located on the east side of the tower. Inside the pulpit is on the west, with galleries of pews on the other three sides.
The tower itself is built in four stages. The first three stories are fieldstone, with brick-trimmed round-arched openings matching those on the building. They are filled with doors on two sides of the first story, windows on the second and louver
ed vents on the third. The second stage is a square, flushboard-sided wood segment with round-arched louvered vents. It is topped with an octagonal section trimmed with pilaster
s at the corners and finally the cupola
, crowned with a weathervane and gold ball.
To the south along the highway is the schoolhouse. It is a one-story clapboard
-sided
frame
building with a gable
d metal roof pierced by a brick chimney. Its corners are pilastered as well and there is a small cornice
.
The parsonage is to the north, past the church cemetery. It is a two-story frame building on a stone basement
with a gabled roof now done in modern shingles
. There is a two-story frame wing, added later, on the rear. The roof's eaves have a boxed cornice
and plain frieze
. On the front is a flat-roofed porch supported by octagonal columns. The first floor has the original Federal style mantel
s.
naval stores
on the lands of the Livingston family
in today's Columbia County
, some of the Germans settled in today's Rhinebeck, swelling the population of an area lightly settled by the Dutch
a few decades before.
In 1715, the Lutheran Germans built a church to share with members of the Dutch Reformed Church
until they could establish their own. They were able to do this 14 years later, in 1729. The next year they built their first church on the site of the current building, midway between the two small settlements in the region along the Albany Post Road
. At that time the main entrance was in the center of the eastern wall, and there was no tower.
By 1786 the congregation had grown to the point that a new building was necessary. It followed the meetinghouse plan, with the exception of the corner tower. The parsonage came later, in 1798, when The Rev. Friedrich Quitman, a man reported to be of high regard within American Lutheranism of the time, was hired as pastor
. His son John
, later to serve as a general in the Mexican-American War and as governor of Mississippi, was born in the house that year.
Later in Quitman's pastorate, in the early 1820s, the congregation hired a local builder named Stephen McCarty to do $3,000 ($ in contemporary dollars) worth of renovations to the church. Following the plans of Christopher Wren
's churches in London
, its original plan was altered to make it more formal. The original side entrance was closed off, longitudinal aisles were introduced and the pews arranged to focus attention on the pulpit. The tower was added as well.
After Quitman's death in 1832, the congregation built the school building. In 1843 all walls save the west one were resurfaced in stucco
, and Venetian shutters (currently stored in the tower) were added to the windows. The growth of the villages and the subsequent establishment of Lutheran churches in them led to a decline in membership at St. Peter. In 1860 the church broke with the Lutheran Synod
, making it hard to find a new pastor and costing it more members.
Renovations continued apace. In 1870 a new pulpit, platform and accompanying furniture were installed. The current pipe organ
came along in 1882. Stained glass
windows, since removed, were installed in 1890, the last major alteration to the original building.
Around that time, John Jacob Astor
bought much of the land in the area for his estate, which had been home to most of the remaining congregants, and later demolished the residences. This exacerbated the decline in membership. The church was still able to continue as a weekly church until 1939, when its members finally went back to the quarterly meetings, the minimum activity necessary to qualify as a separate church.
The area's Lutheran churches still hold occasional services there, and a small local church meets there. The parsonage and school have been used by the Museum of Rhinebeck History since 1993.
Rhinebeck (town), New York
Rhinebeck is a town in Dutchess County, New York, United States. The population was 7,548 at the 2010 census.The Town of Rhinebeck in the northwest part of Dutchess County in the Hudson Valley. Rhinebeck is also the name of a village in the town. US Route 9 passes through the town...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. It is a stone church built in the late 18th century by the area's Palatine German immigrant population. It has been renovated significantly since then. The church congregation was established in 1729.
Worshippers at first were those who farmed the surrounding areas, but as the nearby villages of Rhinebeck
Rhinebeck (village), New York
Rhinebeck is a village located in the Town of Rhinebeck in Dutchess County, New York, USA. The population was 2,657 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Poughkeepsie–Newburgh–Middletown, NY Metropolitan Statistical Area as well as the larger New York–Newark–Bridgeport,...
and Red Hook
Red Hook (village), New York
Red Hook is a village in Dutchess County, New York, USA. The population was 1,961 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Poughkeepsie–Newburgh–Middletown, NY Metropolitan Statistical Area as well as the larger New York–Newark–Bridgeport, NY-NJ-CT-PA Combined Statistical Area...
grew and Lutheran
Lutheranism
Lutheranism is a major branch of Western Christianity that identifies with the theology of Martin Luther, a German reformer. Luther's efforts to reform the theology and practice of the church launched the Protestant Reformation...
churches were established there, the local congregation dwindled. Today only quarterly meetings are held. In 1975 it and the accompanying parsonage (now home to the Museum of Rhinebeck History) and schoolhouse were listed on the National Register of Historic Places
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...
(NRHP).
Property
The church and outbuildings are located on a 7 acres (2.8 ha) parcel on the west side of a curved stretch of Route 9, just 0.6 mile (1 km) north of its junction with NY 9GNew York State Route 9G
New York State Route 9G is a state highway in the Hudson Valley of New York in the United States. It runs north from U.S. Route 9 at Poughkeepsie, starting out as Violet Avenue, then follows the Hudson River mostly along the eastern side of the US 9 to Rhinebeck, where the two...
. It is midway between the villages of Rhinebeck and Red Hook, on a gentle rise in the land.
The main building, the church, is directly opposite the junction with Stone Church Road. It is a three-by-five-bay
Bay (architecture)
A bay is a unit of form in architecture. This unit is defined as the zone between the outer edges of an engaged column, pilaster, or post; or within a window frame, doorframe, or vertical 'bas relief' wall form.-Defining elements:...
fieldstone
Fieldstone
Fieldstone is a building construction material. Strictly speaking, it is stone collected from the surface of fields where it occurs naturally...
two-and-a-half-story edifice with a four-story tower in its southeast corner. The east and west walls are fenestrated
Window
A window is a transparent or translucent opening in a wall or door that allows the passage of light and, if not closed or sealed, air and sound. Windows are usually glazed or covered in some other transparent or translucent material like float glass. Windows are held in place by frames, which...
with high round-arched glass windows trimmed in brick. The main entrance is located on the east side of the tower. Inside the pulpit is on the west, with galleries of pews on the other three sides.
The tower itself is built in four stages. The first three stories are fieldstone, with brick-trimmed round-arched openings matching those on the building. They are filled with doors on two sides of the first story, windows on the second and louver
Louver
A louver or louvre , from the French l'ouvert; "the open one") is a window, blind or shutter with horizontal slats that are angled to admit light and air, but to keep out rain, direct sunshine, and noise...
ed vents on the third. The second stage is a square, flushboard-sided wood segment with round-arched louvered vents. It is topped with an octagonal section trimmed with pilaster
Pilaster
A pilaster is a slightly-projecting column built into or applied to the face of a wall. Most commonly flattened or rectangular in form, pilasters can also take a half-round form or the shape of any type of column, including tortile....
s at the corners and finally the cupola
Cupola
In architecture, a cupola is a small, most-often dome-like, structure on top of a building. Often used to provide a lookout or to admit light and air, it usually crowns a larger roof or dome....
, crowned with a weathervane and gold ball.
To the south along the highway is the schoolhouse. It is a one-story clapboard
Clapboard (architecture)
Clapboard, also known as bevel siding or lap siding or weather-board , is a board used typically for exterior horizontal siding that has one edge thicker than the other and where the board above laps over the one below...
-sided
Siding
Siding is the outer covering or cladding of a house meant to shed water and protect from the effects of weather. On a building that uses siding, it may act as a key element in the aesthetic beauty of the structure and directly influence its property value....
frame
Framing (construction)
Framing, in construction known as light-frame construction, is a building technique based around structural members, usually called studs, which provide a stable frame to which interior and exterior wall coverings are attached, and covered by a roof comprising horizontal ceiling joists and sloping...
building with a gable
Gable
A gable is the generally triangular portion of a wall between the edges of a sloping roof. The shape of the gable and how it is detailed depends on the structural system being used and aesthetic concerns. Thus the type of roof enclosing the volume dictates the shape of the gable...
d metal roof pierced by a brick chimney. Its corners are pilastered as well and there is a small cornice
Cornice
Cornice molding is generally any horizontal decorative molding that crowns any building or furniture element: the cornice over a door or window, for instance, or the cornice around the edge of a pedestal. A simple cornice may be formed just with a crown molding.The function of the projecting...
.
The parsonage is to the north, past the church cemetery. It is a two-story frame building on a stone basement
Basement
__FORCETOC__A basement is one or more floors of a building that are either completely or partially below the ground floor. Basements are typically used as a utility space for a building where such items as the furnace, water heater, breaker panel or fuse box, car park, and air-conditioning system...
with a gabled roof now done in modern shingles
Roof shingle
Roof shingles are a roof covering consisting of individual overlapping elements. These elements are typically flat rectangular shapes laid in rows from the bottom edge of the roof up, with each successive higher row overlapping the joints in the row below...
. There is a two-story frame wing, added later, on the rear. The roof's eaves have a boxed cornice
Cornice
Cornice molding is generally any horizontal decorative molding that crowns any building or furniture element: the cornice over a door or window, for instance, or the cornice around the edge of a pedestal. A simple cornice may be formed just with a crown molding.The function of the projecting...
and plain frieze
Frieze
thumb|267px|Frieze of the [[Tower of the Winds]], AthensIn architecture the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Even when neither columns nor pilasters are expressed, on an astylar wall it lies upon...
. On the front is a flat-roofed porch supported by octagonal columns. The first floor has the original Federal style mantel
Mantel
Mantel is a municipality in the district of Neustadt in Bavaria in Germany....
s.
History
Britain had offered its North American colonies as a refuge to Palatine Germans who fled to escape religious persecution following the War of Spanish Succession in the early 18th century. After years in work camps to pay back the cost of passage, in a failed attempt by the British to produceNaval stores industry
The naval stores industry collects, processes, and markets forest products created from the oleoresin of particular types of pine tree , the slash pine and the longleaf pine...
naval stores
Naval stores
Naval Stores is a broad term which originally applied to the resin-based components used in building and maintaining wooden sailing ships, a category which includes cordage, mask, turpentine, rosin, pitch and tar...
on the lands of the Livingston family
Livingston family
The Livingston family of was a prominent family which migrated from Scotland to the Dutch Republic to the Province of New York in the 17th century. Descended from William, 4th Lord Livingston, its members included signers of the United States Declaration of Independence and the United States...
in today's Columbia County
Columbia County, New York
Columbia County is a county located in the U.S. state of New York. As of the 2010 census, the population was 63,096. The county seat is Hudson. The name comes from the Latin feminine form of the name of Christopher Columbus, which was at the time of the formation of the county a popular proposal...
, some of the Germans settled in today's Rhinebeck, swelling the population of an area lightly settled by the Dutch
Dutch colonization of the Americas
Dutch trading posts and plantations in the Americas precede the much wider known colonization activities of the Dutch in Asia. Whereas the first Dutch fort in Asia was built in 1600 , the first forts and settlements on the Essequibo river in Guyana and on the Amazon date from the 1590s...
a few decades before.
In 1715, the Lutheran Germans built a church to share with members of the Dutch Reformed Church
Dutch Reformed Church
The Dutch Reformed Church was a Reformed Christian denomination in the Netherlands. It existed from the 1570s to 2004, the year it merged with the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Kingdom of the Netherlands to form the Protestant Church in the...
until they could establish their own. They were able to do this 14 years later, in 1729. The next year they built their first church on the site of the current building, midway between the two small settlements in the region along the Albany Post Road
Albany Post Road
The Albany Post Road was a post road - a road used for mail delivery - in the U.S. state of New York. It connected the cities of New York and Albany along the east side of the Hudson River, a service now performed by US 9.The rough route was as follows:...
. At that time the main entrance was in the center of the eastern wall, and there was no tower.
By 1786 the congregation had grown to the point that a new building was necessary. It followed the meetinghouse plan, with the exception of the corner tower. The parsonage came later, in 1798, when The Rev. Friedrich Quitman, a man reported to be of high regard within American Lutheranism of the time, was hired as pastor
Pastor
The word pastor usually refers to an ordained leader of a Christian congregation. When used as an ecclesiastical styling or title, this role may be abbreviated to "Pr." or often "Ps"....
. His son John
John A. Quitman
John Anthony Quitman was an American politician and soldier. He served as Governor of Mississippi from 1835 to 1836 as a Whig and again from 1850 to 1851 as a Democrat and one of the leading Fire-Eaters.-Early life:John A. Quitman studied Classics at Hartwick Seminary, graduating in 1816...
, later to serve as a general in the Mexican-American War and as governor of Mississippi, was born in the house that year.
Later in Quitman's pastorate, in the early 1820s, the congregation hired a local builder named Stephen McCarty to do $3,000 ($ in contemporary dollars) worth of renovations to the church. Following the plans of Christopher Wren
Christopher Wren
Sir Christopher Wren FRS is one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history.He used to be accorded responsibility for rebuilding 51 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including his masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill, completed in 1710...
's churches in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, its original plan was altered to make it more formal. The original side entrance was closed off, longitudinal aisles were introduced and the pews arranged to focus attention on the pulpit. The tower was added as well.
After Quitman's death in 1832, the congregation built the school building. In 1843 all walls save the west one were resurfaced in stucco
Stucco
Stucco or render is a material made of an aggregate, a binder, and water. Stucco is applied wet and hardens to a very dense solid. It is used as decorative coating for walls and ceilings and as a sculptural and artistic material in architecture...
, and Venetian shutters (currently stored in the tower) were added to the windows. The growth of the villages and the subsequent establishment of Lutheran churches in them led to a decline in membership at St. Peter. In 1860 the church broke with the Lutheran Synod
Evangelical Lutheran Synod
The Evangelical Lutheran Synod or ELS is a US-based Protestant Christian denomination based in Mankato, Minnesota, USA. It describes itself as a conservative, Confessional Lutheran body.-Membership:...
, making it hard to find a new pastor and costing it more members.
Renovations continued apace. In 1870 a new pulpit, platform and accompanying furniture were installed. The current pipe organ
Pipe organ
The pipe organ is a musical instrument that produces sound by driving pressurized air through pipes selected via a keyboard. Because each organ pipe produces a single pitch, the pipes are provided in sets called ranks, each of which has a common timbre and volume throughout the keyboard compass...
came along in 1882. Stained glass
Stained glass
The term stained glass can refer to coloured glass as a material or to works produced from it. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant buildings...
windows, since removed, were installed in 1890, the last major alteration to the original building.
Around that time, John Jacob Astor
John Jacob Astor
John Jacob Astor , born Johann Jakob Astor, was a German-American business magnate and investor who was the first prominent member of the Astor family and the first multi-millionaire in the United States...
bought much of the land in the area for his estate, which had been home to most of the remaining congregants, and later demolished the residences. This exacerbated the decline in membership. The church was still able to continue as a weekly church until 1939, when its members finally went back to the quarterly meetings, the minimum activity necessary to qualify as a separate church.
The area's Lutheran churches still hold occasional services there, and a small local church meets there. The parsonage and school have been used by the Museum of Rhinebeck History since 1993.