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NPS Form 10-000 (Oct. 1990) OME No. 100240018 999 United States Department of the Interior Nationa! Park Service AVE 061092 National Register oi Historic Piaces Registration Form NATIONAL REGISTER This form is tor use in nominating or requesting determinations for individual properties and districts. See instructions in How to Complete the National Register of Historic Places Registration Form (National Register Bulletin 16A). Complete each item by marking "x" in the appropriate box or by entering the intormation requested. If an item does not appiy to the property being aocumented, enter "N/A" tor "not applicable." For tunctions, architectural classification, materiais, and areas of significance, enter only categories and subcategories from the instructions. Piace additionai entries and narrative items on continuation sheets (NPS Form 10-900a). Use a typewriter, word processor.
or computer, to compiete all items Name of Property historic nameThe Society of the Congregational Church of Great Barrington (preferred) other names/site number - First Congregational Church of Great Barrington 2. Location street & number 241 and 251 Main Street N/Anot for publication city or townGreat Barrington N/A vicinity state Massachusetts code MA county Berkshire code 003 zip code 01230 3. State/Federal Agency Certification As the designated authority under the National Historic Preservation Act, as amended, I hereby certity that this X nomination nationally statewide * locally. ( See continuation sheet tor additional comments.) sdit e Donono 6 3092 Signature of certitying official/Title Juditb B.
McDonougPate Executive Director Massachusetts Historical Commission, State Historic Preservation Officer State of Federal agency and bureau In my opinion, the property meets does not meet tne National Register criteria. (O See continuation sheet tor additional Signature of certifying official/Title State or Federal agency and bureau 4. National Park Service Certification I hereby certity that the property is: Dentered in the National Register. - See continuation sheet. - determined eligibie tor the National Register - See continuation sheet. D determined not eligible for the National Register D removed from the National Register - other, (explain:) Date Jor Signature of the Keeper ftkt Sage Date of Action 0/20/02 Society of the Congregatonal Church of Great Barrington Name of Property 5.
Ciassification Ownership of Property (Check as many boxis as apply) * private - public-local - public-State public-Federal Category of Property (Check oniy one box; * building(s) - district D site - structure -obiect Berkshire County, MA County and State Number of Resources within Property (Do not include previousiy listed resources in the count.; Contributing Noncontributing 3 Name of related multiple property listing (Enter "N/A." it property is not part of a multiple property listing.) N/A 6. Function or Use Historic Functions (Enter categories from instructions) RELIGION: religious facility RELIGION: church-related residence bulldings sites structures 2 5 obyects _ Total Number of contributing resources previousiy listed in the National Register 0 Current Functions (Enter categories trom instructions) RELIGION: religious facility RELIGION: church-related residence 7.
Description Architectural Classification (Enter categories from instructions) LATE VICTORIAN: Romansque Materiais (Enter categories from instructions) foundation STONE: limestone walls STONE: limestone roof STONE: slate other Narrative Description (Describe the historic and current condition of the property on one or more continuation sheets.) - MAS Pom 1 nasroma de 100s0010 United States Department of theInterior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet The Society of the Congregational Church of Great Barrington Great Barrington (Berkshire County) Massachusetts Section number - Page. 7. DESCRIPTION The Congregational Church of Great Barrington (1883) and its attached manse/parsonage occupy a square 1.25 acre site on the east side of Main Street (Routes 7 and Street.
Main Street is the primary north-south thoroughfare for the downtown area, and is lined with retail establishments and several municipal buildings. Just north of the property, across Pleasant Street, is the 1916 brick Georgian Revival Mason Library. On the opposite side of Main Street from the church, flanking the foot of Elm Street, are a ca. 1850 Greco-Italianate wood-frame house and another Georgian Revival brick structure, the Great Barrington Savings Bank, built in 1950. In spite of the intrusion of a few modern commercial structures, the area around the church has an unusually intact assemblage of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century civic and commercial architecture, including many two- and three-story brick commercial blocks of the 1870s through 1890s.
One block south of the church is the Great Barrington Downtown Historic District (a local historic district), which includes the 1874 Town Hall, 1900 fire from the theater is the Chateauesque 1885-1887 Hopkins/Searles Castle (NR: 1982). The downtown center is bounded on the east by the Housatonic River and on the west by the Boston & Maine Railroad. Between them, especially on the side streets, are numerous mid- to late-nineteenth-century wood-frame houses, boarding houses, and two hotels in various states of alteration. Most of the houses are of the gable-front type with Gothic, Greek Revival or Italianate embellishment. Four other pre-1920 churches are located nearby, representing a variety of types and styles, from the small 1883 wood-shingle Clinton AME Zion Church to the majestic High Gothic marble St. Peter's of 1911.
Set back approximately 100 feet from Main Street, the church faces west over a front lawn, as do its north wing (a former chapel, now used for parish rooms) and attached manse. Next to the street, at the foot of the front walk to the manse, is a low stone mounting block of 1884. Behind the manse at the northeast corner of the property is a free-standing carriage house, its drive opening north onto Pleasant Street. A narrow church parking area stretches along the south edge of the property. The entire complex of buildings is built of locally quarried limestone, with slate roofs. In spite of the fact that the church and manse were designed by two different architects, (W.C. Brocklesby for the church, Peabody & Stearns for the manse and carriage (continued) epa rom raeoa
10610010 United States Department of the Interior NationalPark Service National Register of Historlc Places Continuation Sheet The Society of the Congregational Church of Great Barrington Great Barrington (Berkshire County) Massachusetts Section number _7 Page _2 house,) the assemblage is a remarkably cohesive illustration of the late nineteenth-century Romanesque style at its height, with the influence of the English Revival taste evident in the manse and carriage house. Church and Parish Hall The First Congregational Church, as it is known locally, is a long two-story gable-roofed masonry structure, its longitudinal nave flanked by shallow-buttressed aisles extending along both sides. The ridge of the steeply-pitched roof rises fifty-three feet from the ground.
Situated at the church's southwest facade corner is a five-story, 116-foot-high square tower with flared pyramidal roof and entrances in its south and west sides. A third of the church facade. At the rear of the nave is a shallow eastward projection which houses the altar/chancel area. A one-story shed-roofed kitchen, its 18-foot southern section added in 1907, abuts the rear of the building. Extending north from the sanctuary is a high one-story gabled wing which was originally built for a chapel, and now functions as the parish hall. It has two cross-gabled entrances on the facade, which project forward from the main plane of the front wall, and are joined by a double window wall. Its main roof ridge is crowned by an octagonal cupola. The walls of the 1883 structure are of rock-faced blue-gray dolomite of local origin.
Part of the wall material, primarily in the lower sections, remains from a prior church of 1859, which burned in 1882. Matching stone for the present church was cut from the same quarry as the material for the former building. The entire 1883 structure stands on a stone foundation and basement of limestone and blue dolomite remaining from the 1859 church. The roof of the church and parish hall is a green Vermont slate; the south-facing slopes were reslated in 1989. The church building has one exterior limestone chimney, which abuts the north end of the chancel at the rear of the sanctuary. In addition to its traditional massing of nave, aisles, and heavily-proportioned corner tower, much of the church's Romanesque character comes from its fenestration and detailing.
A fourteen-foot rose window of blue cathedral glass forms the focal point of the west facade; below it is a line of four double round-arched windows. All the major openings in the church, in fact, employ the round Romanesque arch, echoed throughout by heavy moldings and trimmings, some in brownstone, some in a contrasting dolomite. (continued) - Unted Surtes Deparsmert of the imenor Natona Par SerO National Register of Historis Pigces Continuation Sheet The Society of the Congregational Church of Great Barrington Great Barrington (Berkshire County) Massachusetts Section number Pape - Both brownstone and dolomite band courses add a horizontal emphasis to the tower and the main facade. Portland brownstone is also used for the coping at the front and rear roofline, in the surround of the rose window, at the sills of the facade windows, and in the weatherings of the buttresses.
Its color contrast is most emphatic in fields of checkered imbrication at the main gable peak and in the surround of the clock faces in the fifth story of the bell tower. The fourth story of the tower, where the bell is located, has a large of the cosee, round-arched louvered opening in each side. Rectangular multi-light sash windows illuminate the basement story along the side elevations of the church. At the main story along each of the side aisles are nine window bays (five on the south, four on the north,) containing double round-arched, tracery windows of multi-colored cathedral glass, two of them pictorial. Above the roofs of the aisles, below the eaves of the main roof, each side elevation of the nave has a band of ten double clerestory windows of pale blue and yellow cathedral glass. All the glasswork was executed by W. J. McPherson of Boston, and is in excellent condition.
facade entries of both the church and north wing are fitted with paneled, double-leaf doors. Those in the main church have wood-paneled tympani above; the two in the wing are topped with quarter-circle glass lights. Except for some repainting over the years and the enlargement of the eondilc bet te ehuren eroe iz aiviaod Baco cehs across the west front with choir and organ loft above, the long nave and aisles with a seating capacity of 600, and at the east end, an altar and shallow chancel area. Colonnades of round arches on foliate-capitaled columns support the clerestory. The roof support structure consists of a series of complex round-arched trusses of oiled southern pine, which spring from the clerestory level above each set of columns. Four rows of purlins contribute a longitudinal emphasis along the plastered ceiling.
The wall and ceiling surfaces of the church were originally covered with elaborate decorative frescoing and stencilwork, much of it in geometric border designs. The large recessed arch of the chancel, which today is painted a solid color, was once elaborately embellished with gold geometric motifs and bronze lettering. The jambs of the windows are plastered up to the window frames, and are finished and stops. Wood paneling, carved rails and stiles, and turned balustrades form both the curved front of the organ loft (its center section was extended in 1936), and the screen that separates the nave from the narthex at the west end of the church.
The black walnut pews are copies of those from the 1859 church; the head of each seat is punctuated with an ornamented (continued) -1 Untted Surtes Depermert of tre interor Natonal Park Serce National Register of Historis Places Continuation Sheet The Society of the Congregational Church of Great Barrington Great Barrington (Berkshire County) Massachusetts Section number. Pape post and fine panel work, above which are balusters supporting a fluted arm. At the east end of the sanctuary is a solid mahogany pulpit designed by the church's pastor of 1867-1886, the Rev. Evarts Scudder. It is embellished with panels and carvings, and a carved inscription in Greek, meaning "the truth shall make you free." The lower section of the east wall behind the pulpit is wainscoted in panels of solid mahogony.
A marble baptismal font in front of the chancel was salvaged from the 1882 fire, and dates to ca. 1813. The west end of the church interior above the first story is dominated by one of the most important organs in New England, and the largest in western Massachusetts. It was built in 1883, simultaneous with the erection of the church, by Hilborne L. Roosevelt of New York, the most influential American organ-builder of his time. It encompasses three stories of pipes, pneumatic chests and air reservoirs. The case, of solid paneled and carved mahogany and ebony, was designed by London architect, G.A. Audsley. The front pipes are now, as they were originally, painted in gold. The main interior space of the parish hall is illuminated by a hip-roofed dormer on both the west and east roof slopes. On the rear is a full-width, shed-roofed section which houses a kitchen.
In spite of its conversion early in this century from a chapel, the parish hall retains virtually all its original interior architectural features, including arched, decorative rafters, tongue-and-groove wainscoting, pictorial stained glass, paneled doors, and interior shutters on the smaller windows. Manse/parsonage Designed by the firm of Peabody and Stearns of Boston, the manse was completed in 1884, a year after the church. It is connected to the north vestibule of the parish hall by a thirty-foot gable-roofed stone "cloister," or walkway, with wide, flat arches supported on square posts. The building is two-and-a-half_and three stories, and blends Romanesque massing with elements of the English Revival style.
Its stone wall fabric is a local blue dolomite, slightly darker in color than the church, with small portions of the rear elevations clad in clapboard and patterned wood shingle. Like the rest of the complex, this building has a rough-faced ashlar stone foundation, and a full basement. In contrast to the green church roof, the roof of the manse is a Vermont red slate. Typical of much of the work done in the 1880s by Peabody & Stearns, ta bulldine of hn yo omplex mas para de tayinga (continued) untad Sune Deparsmert et the imteno wmtonal Par amo National Register of Historis Piaces Continuation Sheet The Society of the Congregational Church of Great Barrington Great Barrington (Berkshire County) Massachusetts Section numper. Pape Street, with a tall exterior stone chimney at either end.
The facade is an asymmetrical composition, the planes of its two-story north section broken by a large polygonal bay window at the first floor and board-and-batten dormer on the front roof slope. The east half of the facade is three stories high, with the main entry recessed under a deep fifteen-foot-wide stone archway, its curve emphasized by stepped buttressing at the southwest corner of the wall. A corresponding archway is cut in the front corner of the south wall. Above the main archway at the second story of the facade is a polygonal wooden oriel bay window; the third story has a high wall gable trimmed with stone coping and a finial at its apex. On the south elevation of the building, in front of a short two-story bay that connects with the cloister, is a shallow second-story wooden balcony.
The west elevation of the main part of the manse is spanned by an open wooden "piazza" supported on unfluted Tuscan columns, a simple wooden rail and balustrade and stone foundation. Behind it is a one-and-a-half-story assemblage of shed-roofed and cross-gabled sections, including a second porch recessed under the roof of a one-story The porch retains a balustrade composed of straight balusters and a heavy rail curved upward at the ends. This is the same type of railing that formerly adorned the main piazza, and was used in two balconies (now gone)--one on the piazza roof and another over the facade bay window. The high north foundation wall of the ell slopes several feet beyond the rear of the building to form the west half of a stone gateway, ending in a square post behind the kitchen entrance.
The rear of the manse is a composition of many projections and a variety of surface materials. A large cross-gabled section, two-and-a-half-stories high, projects east from the main roof; it has a patterned-shingle gable, and a diagonal stone chimney at the Abutting its rear wall is a wide polygonal two-story bay with patterned shingle at the second story. Between the bay and the northeast ell, under a shed roof, is a low one-story stone and clapboard conservatory, with pitch-roofed, board-and-batten dormer above. The Peabody & Stearns touch is nowhere more evident than in the architectural detailing of this building. All sills, jambs, thresholds and soffits of the openings are finely hammered stone. Copper cresting and flashing remain at the roof.
The taste for the English Revival is evident in the fenestration, most of it consisting of multi-light over single sash, with some windows paired or tripled. The main entry door of heavy, multi-paneled oak is four-feet wide and is divided, "Dutch door" fashion, across the center. The manse interior consists of entrance hall, parlor, library (minister's (continued) United States Department of the imterior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet The Society of the Congregational Church of Great Barrington Great Barrington (Berkshire County) Massachusetts Section number - Page 6 study,) dining-room, kitchen, pantry, and lavatory on the first floor, six bedrooms with one-and-a-half baths on the second, and on the third, a bedroom, billiard- or playroom, former bathroom, and open attic.
The floorsof the the others are of spruce, which was Heavy beams of quartered oak adorn the ceilings of both the entrance hall and library. The large irregular hexagon-shaped entrance hall has a profusion of oak paneling in its high wainscoting, interior doors and door jambs. At the broad stairway are turned balusters and square, tapered newel posts with carved roping ending in a graceful pointed top. An oak and marble fireplace is diagonally positioned beside a broad archway that opens into a reception alcove at the southwest corner of the building. Behind the alcove is the dining room, which has a broad bay window connecting to the small rear conservatory, and the small, cloister/walkway. The parlor, located at the front of the house north of the entrance hall, is both finished and furnished in rosewood; much of its trim is now painted.
At second story level, the woodwork of the main stairway, which turns and The interior finish of the bedrooms is as finely detailed as that of the first story, and includes a variety of carved and molded mantel designs (now painted,) two of them ebe carvoe and polced saneol da sagn too pa fitted with Delft tiles. Carriage house Behind the manse at the northeast corner of the property is a one-and-a- half-story, hip-roofed carriage house, also designed by Peabody & Stearns in materials and style as the manse. Its roof slopes are pierced on three sides by dormers. The facade dormer is the most elaborate, with a through-cornice hay door sheltered by a conical roof embellished with exposed rafter ends. The main entrance of the carriage house, facing west toward the manse, has a massive stone lintel.
A heavy stone wall extends west toward the house to form the east half of the gateway to the property. inside finish of the building, including the broad planks of the floor, is of Georgia pine. Mounting block On the lawn in front of the manse, close to the road, is a low cut-stone block that was placed in position in 1884 when the manse was built. For decades it (continued) CN CAMA. Unted Statas Dederiment of tha incanior National Parx Service National Register of Historic Piaces Continuation Sheet The Society of the Congregational Church of Great Barrington Great Barrington (Berkshire County) Massachusetts Section number_ Page _1 was used by ladies mounting and dismounting from their carriages. Alterations. There are extremely few significant alterations anywhere in this complex of buildings.
The church interior has been repainted, a stairway added in the narthex, and the organ compass enlarged and console replaced--hence the ensuing extension of the front of the loft. The church kitchen was extended by eighteen feet across the rear of the chancel in 1907, using identical stone to that of the church. At about the same time the chapel was converted to a parish hall; later a small ladies' room was inserted in the southernmost gabled entryway. At the manse, roof balconies were removed from the bay window and piazza and the piazza railing replaced. On the interior, the kitchen has been modernized, and some woodwork originally left unpainted has been painted over. In the early 1920's the upper floors of the carriage house were converted to clubrooms for the congregation's young people.
Archaeological Description While no prehistoric sites are currently recorded on the property it is possible that sites are present. Locational characteristics of the parcel including well drained soils on a terrace within 1000' of the Housatonic River indicate the favorable criteria for prehistoric settlement and subsistence activities. In addition, nine prehistoric sites have been recorded in the general area (within one In general, however, the potential for significant prehistoric survivals is low because of the impacts of church, manse and carriage house construction which cover much of the property. There is a low to moderate potential for significant historic period survivals on the property. Construction features and trash areas may survive from the 1859 church or later 1883 structure reportedly built on the footprint of the 1859 structure.
Historic period resources which pre-date these structures have not been identified for the property. (end) Society of the Congregational Name of Ghe oPropf Great Barrington 8. Statement of Signiticance Applicabie National Register Criteria (Mar" *" in one or more boxes tor tne critena qualifvina ine propeny tor National Regisie: isting.) x A Property is associated with events that nave made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history. - B Property is associated with the lives of persons significant in our past. x C Property embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period,or method of construction or represents the work of a master, or possesses high artistic values, or represents a significant and distinguishable entity whose components lack individual distinction.
WD Property has yielded, or is likely to yield, information important in prehistory or history. Criteria Considerations (Mark "x" in all the boxes that apply.) Property is: X A owned by a religious institution or used for religious purposes. C B removed from its original location. - C a birthplace or grave. - D a cemetery. - E a reconstructed building, object, or structure. - F a commemorative property. -G less than 50 years of age or achieved significance within the past 50 years. Berkshire County, MA County and State Areas of Sioniticance (Enter categones trom instructions) ARCHITECTURE RELIGION INVENTION COMMUNITY PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT PERFORMING ARTS: music Period of Significance 1883-1942 Significant Dates 1883 1884 Significant Person (Complete if Criterion B is marked above) N/A Cultural Affiliation N/A Architect/Builder Brocklesby, William C. Peabody, Robert S. Stearns, John G.
Narrative Statement of Significance