USA > New York > Dutchess County > The history of Dutchess County, New York > Part 22
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1. First Reformed Church of Poughkeepsie. Rev. A. P. Van Gieson, D.D., 1893.
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part of this chapter, until 1830. Meanwhile, however, the second church was built, somewhere about 1760, land having been purchased for it from Gale Yelverton on the north side of East Lane, as Main street was then called, opposite the end of Market street. Around this church also burials were made and a considerable number of stones are still standing there, in the rear of the Nelson House Annex. The church just previous to the erection of the second building had been badly divided between the Coetus and Conferentie parties, the first of which held that ministers could be ordained in America, while the sec- ond maintained that the only authority was in Holland. The fourth pastor of the church, Dominie Henricus Schoonmaker, was a member of the Coetus party and on his arrival here, in 1764, for ordination, he found the church in possession of the opposite party and the ser- vices of ordination took place under a tree not far from where the present church is located, the officiating minister, Rev. John H. Goet- schius, standing in a wagon. The Conferentie party called another minister, Rev. Isaac Rysdick, from Holland, and from 1765 to 1772 the churches had two pastors. Dr. Rysdick left Poughkeepsie to take charge of the Fishkill, Hopewell, and New Hackensack churches in 1773, after which time the Poughkeepsie church always had a pastor of its own, separate from Fishkill. Dr. Van Gieson notes that Mr. Schoonmaker, who was a most eloquent preacher in the Dutch lan- guage, left Poughkeepsie in 1774 chiefly because he could not preach well in English. There had been occasional preaching in the Eng- lish language in the church ever since 1740, and from that time the Dutch lost ground while the English continued to gain. The Dutch language was not officially given up until pretty nearly 1800, and its long continuance was the cause of considerable losses of the younger element in the church. In 1789 the church was incorporated, with Henry Hegeman, Peter Tappen, Isaac Romine, John Frear, Myndert VanKleeck, Henry Livingston, Jr., Abraham Fort and Benjamin Westervelt as elders and deacons. During and just after the Revo- lution the church was in charge of Rev. John H. Livingston, after- wards president of Rutgers College. At the close of his pastorate there was a period of interregnum and there appears to have been a time, while the atheistic agitators of the French Revolution were at their height, when religion in America was at a rather low ebb and all the churches had some difficulty in maintaining themselves. After
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the Dutch language had been officially given up the church seems to have tried to hold as many of the English speaking people not affiliated with the Episcopal Church together as possible and an effort was made even to drop the Dutch name, which, however, did not succeed fully until much later. The Dutch Church appears to have taken the place of the Presbyterian Church in Poughkeepsie, however, for a consider- able period. In 1822 the church on the north side of Main street was abandoned and a new building was erected upon. the site of the pres- ent church, then a part of the parsonage lot. A part of the church property on the north side of Main street had long before been sold and the Poughkeepsie Hotel had been built upon it. The rest was then leased for a long term and the Main street frontage was held by the church until 1908, when the two properties occupied by Robert Knox's Sons and Drislane as grocery stores were sold and the money applied to the purchase of the present parsonage on Mill street. In 1830 the property on the south side of Main street, corner of Market, known then as the Dutch Church Cemetery, was leased for one hun- dred years, and the Brewster Block was erected. This block has been somewhat altered so that the roof lines and fronts do not exactly cor- respond as they formerly did, but it is still possible to trace from the general character of the buildings the extent of the church property. The building of the third church and the leasing of the property on Main street for long terms was all done under the able pastorate of Rev. Cornelius C. Cuyler one of the notable ministers of the church, 1809-1833. Another notable minister of the church was Rev. A. L. Mann, under whose pastorate, in 1847, the congregation had so in- creased that the accommodations of the spacious building appeared to be too small and a second church was organized with Tunis Brincker- hoff, Charles P. Adriance, Abraham G. Storm and Joseph H. Jack- son as elders and James W. Bogardus, Casper D. Smith, Albert Brett and John P. Flagler as deacons. They erected the present Second Reformed Church on the corner of Mill and Catharine streets and it was dedicated on Washington's Birthday in 1849. Its first pastor was Rev. Charles Whitehead, installed October 2, 1849. On Sunday, January 18, 1857, the first Dutch Church was burned and the fire was one of the most memorable events in the history of Poughkeepsie. The thermometer, it is stated, was thirteen degrees below zero at noon and a strong north wind was blowing which forced it down to twenty
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degrees before dark, when a fierce snow storm had set in. The fire started in the roof of the church just at the close of the Rev. Dr. Mann's morning sermon, and was discovered soon after the dismissal of the congregation. There are still living a few old firemen who re- member the event and they agree in declaring that water froze in the air as it left the hose pipes. It is certain that hydrants were frozen and that one or two of the old piano box fire engines froze up so that they could not be used. The burning of the steeple, according to the account in the Poughkeepsie Eagle of the day, "presented a fearful column of fire ascending far up toward the clouds." After it had fallen the mass of burning material was so great that the entire space inside the walls seemed filled with flame until ten o'clock at night, in spite of the water the hand engines could pour upon it. The present church was erected soon after the fire and was dedicated September 7, 1858. It had originally a lofty spire, which was condemned and taken down in 1878. One of the most notable pastorates of the church was that of Rev. Dr. Acmon P. Van Gieson, which began in 1867 and continued until his death in the spring of 1906.
The first English Church in Poughkeepsie, the Presbyterian Church, was organized as early as 1749, but failed to maintain itself on a per- manent basis or to erect a building. Services were conducted first in connection with Fishkill and afterwards in connection with Char- lotte precinct, which included Washington Hollow and Pleasant Val- ley. After 1772 there appears to have been only occasional sermons until some time in the nineteenth century.
The Church of England, the predecessor of the present Episcopal Church, owes its beginning to the missionary work of Rev. Samuel Seabury, who occasionally visited Poughkeepsie as early as 1755, preaching to the people who belonged to his faith. The church started with a vigorous organization in 1766 and erected its first building on the corner of Church and Market streets, where the Armory now stands. The first church building remained standing until 1833, when the old Christ Church, still well remembered, was erected. During the Revolution most of the prominent members of Christ Church, in- cluding its minister, Rev. John Beardsley, who had come here from Groton, Conn., remained loyal to the king and the feeling against them was so great that the church for a time was closed. Mr. Beards- ley originally had charge of the Fishkill church as well as the Pough-
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keepsie church, but like the Dutch dominie, he elected to make his home here, and eighty-seven acres of land were purchased for him on the Filkintown road, where the old Glebe House, now generally known as the Fricker House, still stands. A royal charter was granted the church March 3, 1773, by King George III and a grant of two hun- dred acres of what had previously been regarded as common land was added to the Glebe. This land afterwards caused the church consid- erable litigation and an attempt was made to confiscate it during the Revolution. After the prejudices of the Revolutionary times had somewhat softened, the church was reopened and a new rector, bear- ing the Dutch name Henry VanDyke, came to take charge in. 1787. In 1797 Trinity Church, of New York, assisted it with a gift of five hundred pounds for a parsonage house and two years later the house still standing on the southeast corner of Cannon and Academy streets was purchased for that purpose and used for a short time. The prop- erty on Montgomery and Academy streets, where the present church stands, and so long known as the old English Burying Ground, was purchased in 1828 and remained a cemetery until 1871, when the common council forbade further interments there. By that time it had grown up into a forest and was for a long time much neglected. A high picket fence surrounded the property, but did not prevent the small boys in the neighborhood from getting in and creating a cer- tain amount of damage to tombstones and the railings which sur- rounded many of the plots. When the present beautiful new church was built all this was cleared up, many of the graves were removed to the Rural Cemetery and the smaller stones which used to be studded thickly throughout the whole plot have been mostly laid flat on the ground so as not to interfere with the running of a mowing machine. The cornerstone of the new church was laid September 25, 1887, and it was consecrated May 15, 1888, by Bishop Scarborough, who had been the first rector of the Church of the Holy Comforter. Albert Tower, proprietor of the iron furnaces which for so many years were a leading Poughkeepsie industry, contributed more than half of the total cost of the building, which has been stated at $120,000. This was during the notable rectorship of Rev. Henry L. Ziegenfuss, who served the church from 1874 to 1894.
The second Episcopal Church in Poughkeepsie, St. Paul's, was or- ganized in August, 1835, and was built originally of wood in Grecian
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Doric style, in 1837. It was built by the real estate boomers of the day as one of the attractions of Mansion Square neighborhood. The present church was finished and opened in May, 1872, during the rectorship of Rev. S. H. Synnott.
The Church of the Holy Comforter owes its existence to William A. Davies, who inherited from his father, William Davies, a large amount of land, including a part of the Main street dock property. He resided in the house nearly opposite the railroad station, after- wards the home of Hon. George Innis. William A. and Thomas L. Davies gave the church a lot 125 feet square, May 10, 1859, and the church was consecrated October 25, 1860, Rev. John Scarborough be- coming the first rector. He remained until 1867, when he was suc- ceeded by Rev. Robert Fulton Crary, who remained in active service until 1907.
The first new denomination to organize in Poughkeepsie after the Revolution was the Methodist. Rev. Freeborn Garettson preached the first Methodist sermon here in 1796 in the Dutch Church. The Methodists organized in 1804 and by 1805 were strong enough to build their first church, which was located on the east side of Jefferson street, a few hundred feet south of Church street, the plot being still open and one of the oldest of several little abandond graveyards in the city. This church, we are told in "Vincent's Methodism in Pough- keepsie," was about fifty by forty feet, with galleries, but was left un- plastered above the galleries until 1814, when Poughkeepsie became a Methodist station with a settled minister, Rev. J. M. Smith. In 1826 they had outgrown the Jefferson street church and purchased for $650 a lot on Washington street, where Eastman College now stands, and a new church was dedicated on December 27th of that year. It is stated that the Methodists at that time had but 182 members and were $900 in debt on their old church, but by 1837 they had increased to 616 and in 1840 they decided to form a second congregation, which five years later built the Cannon street Methodist Church at a cost of $8,650. This church long remained one of the most prominent in the city and the congregation continued to grow until a new building became necessary, and in 1892, in the pastorate of Rev. C. H. Gregory, the present Trinity Church was dedicated on the corner of South Ham- ilton street and Hooker avenue, the old church having been sold to the Masons, who extended its front out to the sidewalk and remodeled
GEORGE V. L. SPRATT.
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it into the present Masonic Temple. Meanwhile, in 1847, a German Methodist Church had been organized under Rev. Daniel Duerstein and the first building was dedicated September 22, 1850, on the site of the present German Methodist Church in South Bridge street. The present Washington street Methodist Church, on the corner of Mill street, was built in 1858, and a few years later the old church was purchased by H. G. Eastman for his growing commercial college. In 1843 the members of the colored Methodist Church, who had separated from the congregation of the first church in 1837, erected a building on the site of their present church in Catharine street, and in 1853 the Methodists sent out still another congregation, when the Hedding Church was erected.
The Quakers, it is said, had established a meeting house somewhere on Clover street not long after 1800. The Quaker families had been numerous in Dutchess County for some time and had gradually come in and settled in the village, many of them becoming very prominent citizens. In 1820 they erected a new meeting house on the rear of a deep Washington street lot, a part of which is still occupied by the Hicksite meeting house, built in 1894, now fronting on Lafayette Place. The old meeting house building is still in existence, but has been altered into a double dwelling. After the separation of the Hicksite and Orthodox Friends the later purchased a lot on the north side of Mill street, not far above Garden, and there built a meeting house, which was used for a number of years, but finally also was con- verted into a dwelling house and now stands on Conklin street. The Montgomery street meeting house was built by the Orthodox Friends in 1863, being the only church in the city built during the war. It has since been enlarged somewhat and considerably changed in ap- pearance.
The Baptists organized in 1807 and their records are complete and well preserved, a short, well-written history of the church having been published by Rev. Rufus Babcock in 1841. The first building was erected on Mill street, not long after the organization, on the site of the present Baptist Church, the lot having been donated by Col. James Tallmadge, one of the prominent citizens of the day. In 1839 the Lafayette street Baptist Church, now the Polish Catholic, was built at a cost of $20,000, one-half of which was donated by Matthew Vas- sar, and the old church in Mill street was rented to the new Methodist
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congregation which afterwards erected the Cannon street church. The building of this Lafayette street church was one of the causes of a division in the congregation, one of the branches returning to the old Mill street church. These remained apart until 1867, when they came together in the Lafayette street church until the building of the pres- ent church in Mill street in 1879, when the Lafayette street church was abandoned. John Guy and Matthew Vassar, Jr., were leading contributors to the new building, as their uncle had been to the one abandoned, and the church was at the time very much the finest in the city. The colored people who had maintained a Baptist congre- gation in Poughkeepsie for some ten years erected a building on the corner of Winnikee avenue and Smith street, about two years ago, known as the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
The Presbyterians, as we have seen, organized the first English speaking congregation in Poughkeepsie long before the Revolution, but were unable to maintain themselves. Apparently Scotch immi- gration and immigration from the north of Ireland was mostly into the interior of the county rather than to the river towns. It was not until 1817 that the Presbyterians were able to form a permanent organization in Poughkeepsie, and not until 1826 that they purchased the property next west of the original Dutchess County Academy, on Cannon street, and built their first church on the lot where now stands the Young Women's Christian Association building. There were then eighteen members, and Joseph Allen, David Hibbard, William Wil- liams and Marquis de Lafayette Phillips were chosen as ruling elders. This church stood for a long time and was used for many purposes. The Presbyterians gave it up in 1850 and built a new church on the corner of Cannon and Hamilton streets in the pastorate of Rev. Henry G. Ludlow. This second building in turn, has been superseded by the finest and most costly church in the city, dedicated April 5, 1908. This beautiful new building cost, with its memorial windows, organ and equipment, pretty nearly $200,000, a large part of which was donated by William W. Smith and a considerable sum also by Mrs. John F. Winslow. At the time the first church was built the contro- versy which a few years later divided the denomination into a New School and Old School was raging and resulted in 1831 in the or- ganization of the Second Presbyterian Church, which erected a build- ing on the corner of Mill and Vassar streets, now the Jewish Syna-
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gogue. When the Presbyterians built on the corner of Cannon and Hamilton streets the original church on Cannon street was sold to the Universalists, who maintained services in Poughkeepsie for a number of years, but were never very strong. They rented the building as a sort of village hall for lectures and entertainments for a considerable number of years and later it became and remained for a number of years St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church. The history of the Catho- lic Churches is written in a separate chapter, so need not be further referred to here, except to say that St. Peter's congregation was the first organized and dates from about 1839.
German immigration became important enough to require occa- sional services in that language about 1840. The first German church organized, as has been already stated, was the Methodist, and the Lutherans were not organized until 1856, nor able to own a place of worship until 1858, when they purchased and fitted up what is prob- ably the oldest building in town, the old Noxon House, on the east side of Market street near the corner of Noxon. The German Lutheran Church in Grand street was the first church in the city built after the war and was dedicated in 1866. In 1901, so many of the second generation of Germans had begun to prefer the English lan- guage and were drifting into other churches that an English Lutheran Church was organized and purchased property at 176 Church street in 1903.
The Congregational Church, an outgrowth of the Second Presby- terian Church, was organized in 1837, and for a time made use of the building on the corner of Vassar and Mill streets .. The present Con- gregational Church, on Mill street, below Garden, was dedicated June 5, 1860, and the old church was sold to the Hebrews, who had main- tained an organization here under the name of the Children of Israel since 1848. A second Hebrew congregation was organized a number of years ago with a place of worship on Noxon street.
Y. M. C. A. AND OTHER INSTITUTIONS.
The Young Men's Christian Association was organized August 21, 1863, with John H. Matthews, president; James S. Case, vice presi- dent ; Frank L. Stephens, corresponding secretary; John I. Platt, re- cording secretary, and William B. Fox, treasurer. It was an out- growth, however, of an older association, organized in 1856, called the Young Men's Christian Union, the president of which was Alfred B.
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Smith. The Association held meetings in a room over the City Bank, on the corner of Main and Market streets, until in 1872 it felt itself strong enough to purchase the present building, then the great place of lectures and amusements in the city known as Pine Hall. The build- ing was remodelled and has from time to time been improved, until last year it was decided to abandon it, as Mr. William W. Smith had offered to erect a new building on the site of the old Hooker House on Market street. The cornerstone of the new building was laid Novem- ber 15th 1908, after the building had already been partly erected. It will probably cost in the neighborhood of $200,000. Mr. Smith was also the chief donor of the new building for the Young Women's Christian Association, erected in 1904, on Cannon street on the site of the old church building which served so many denominations. The Young Woman's Association was organized in 1881 and incorporated in 1884. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union also has a build- ing on Cannon street, the old Poughkeepsie Female Academy, pur- chased in 1889. This organization was founded in 1873 in aid of the Woman's Crusade, then in progress in Ohio.
The Union Rescue Mission was organized in 1894 and started in what was formerly an old saloon at 42 North Clover street. The cornerstone of the present building was laid in October, 1896. This work has been, since started, under the superintendence of Charles H. Madison. During the past year the local board of trustees handed it over to the Federation of Rescue Missions, which is now in control.
CHARITABLE INSTITUTIONS.
Poughkeepsie is unusually well provided with charitable institutions. The oldest of these is the Women's Union Bible and Tract Society, which dates back at least to 1840, when its first president was Mrs. Frederick W. Hatch, wife of the rector of St. Paul's Church, and it seems to have been the successor of organizations formed in the early part of the century. It has no building, but employs regular visitors who go into the homes of the poor and ascertain their needs.
The Home for the Friendless on the corner of South Hamilton and Franklin streets, was built in 1887, the result of the work of a society organized earlier, known originally as the Poughkeepsie Female Guar- dian Society. The building of this orphanage has been considerably enlarged and it provided a home in 1908 for about fifty children.
The Old Ladies' Home was founded by Jonathan Warner, who pur-
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DR. H. F. CLARK.
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chased, in 1870, the building originally erected by the Dutchess County Academy. William W. Smith, about 1905, considerably en- larged this building and it has been made a very attractive and cheer- ful place for those who spend their declining years there.
The Vassar Brothers' Home for Aged Men, which occupies the site of the residence of Matthew Vassar, corner of Main and Vassar streets, was erected by John Guy Vassar and Matthew Vassar, Jr., in 1880. This was one of the many benefactions of the Vassar brothers, another of which was the Vassar Brothers' Institute, also located on Vassar street on the site of the early Vassar Brewery. The Institute has an endowment fund and carries on popular lectures and class work in arts and crafts, mechanical drawing, etc., during each winter. The building was erected in 1882 to provide a home for two local societies, the Poughkeepsie Literary Club and the Poughkeepsie Society of Natural Science, which had been in existence for a number of years and had been very successful. They have now, however, practically ceased to exist as separate organizations. A second home for old men, the Pringle Home, designed for men of literary tastes, was founded in 1900 on Academy street in a house formerly the residence of Col. O. T. Beard.
Vassar Brothers' Hospital was founded by Matthew Vassar, Jr., and the main building was erected in 1884 in the south part of the city overlooking the river. It was made one of the residuary lega- tees of the estate of John Guy Vassar and thereby came into the pos- session of a large endowment. Additions nearly doubling its capacity were built a few years ago and a library and laboratory building was erected in 1899.
There had been an earlier hospital, known as the St. Barnabas, using a building on North Clinton street. The St. Barnabas fund is still in existence and used for home relief, and there is now talk of building with it a new St. Barnabas Hospital for tuberculosis patients.
The House of Industry was an outgrowth of the Woman's Re- lief Associations formed during the Civil War. It was organized in the fall of 1865 with Mary Ferris as president. In 1873 it purchased its present home on Liberty street. Its aim is to furnish work to women who need it.
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