USA > Rhode Island > Newport County > Newport > Trinity church in Newport, Rhode Island; a history of the fabric > Part 7
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To judge by the color of the old exposed panelling, the inside was not painted till these old paints, with the blue and heavy green of 1745-1760, had become unfashionable. The council chamber in the Colony House had under its oak graining a grey-green, which is probably the "light stone color" recommended by a com-
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THE INTERIOR
mittee which reported on necessary repairs in May, 1784.120 Traces of this color are to be found in Trinity both on the main floor and in the gallery. The first coat put upon the woodwork of the inte- rior was of this color. The lower panelling exposed, when the pew at the south of the altar steps was taken down, was like this, in contrast to the white of the small panels above it.
Above this grey-green-almost light olive-is a coat of grey. Then come coats of the same white lead and litharge which we found on the outside and finally coats of white lead with no trace of the powdered litharge.
The east side of the north pew was never painted-that of the south pew only after many years. There may have been a prejudice against painting the inside of the pews, which may account for the entry in the estimate of the cost of the First Baptist Meeting House, in Providence, made in August, 1774: "Painting-in Side, all the woodwork except the Pews and floors." This prejudice cer- tainly appeared in Providence at the building of the present St. John's in 1810-1811, possibly because of a fear that the paint would be "tacky" in hot weather, but it is not enough, if it existed, to account for the bare wood in Trinity. Leaving the wood bare was a custom of the time. Paint was not by any means always used in the houses of the early eighteenth century, even when the rooms were panelled-still less when they were sheathed. Possibly the increasing difficulty in finding boards wide enough for the great panels, and at the same time free of knots, brought about a resort to paint. The old carpenters did not leave knots in panels meant to be left unpainted.
The plaster may have been left white-it is probable. One member of the congregation remembers when the walls were green, but this must have been the color adopted in 1855, when, on May 23, "The Wardens were to use their discretion and taste 120 Bulletin, Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, vol. VIII, no. 2, p. 12.
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TRINITY CHURCH IN NEWPORT
in painting the interior of the Church."121 In 1834, it had been voted that the church should be "painted, inside and out, and the walls whitewashed." The wall painting of 1855 took the place of this whitewash.
The Eastern Addition
T HE problem of the crowded church could be solved only in one way-the building must be enlarged. It could not be widened, it must be made longer. This meant more land. In some way, which it has not yet been possible to trace, the land at the east of the Brinley lot, east of the line DE (Figure 6), which ap- pears in the old deeds as belonging to the heirs of Major Peleg Sanford deceased, was purchased or otherwise acquired about 1758, and a plan was set on foot for enlarging the church toward the east. This course was probably taken because land at the east could be acquired, while that at the west could not be. At least, it was not in the possession of the parish until more than a century later.
On January 11, 1762, appears in the records the first suggestion for enlarging the church. The congregation met on that day and voted "that the Rev. Marmaduke Browne should be our minis- ter .... " The final entry records a vote appointing John Mawds- ley, Benjamin Mason, Andrew Hunter, Thomas Cranston and Charles Wickham a "committee to consider the making of an ad- dition to our Church and report to us on Thursday next."122 One week later, on January 18, 1762, at an adjourned meeting, the congregation passed this curious vote: "that the Church might be enlarged to the eastward, provided the gentlemen hereafter men- tioned give security to the Church, that they will make the addi- 121 Mason, Annals of Trinity Church (2d series), p. 163.
122 Mason, Annals of Trinity Church, pp. 122, 123. Mr. Browne's church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, had recently been lengthened.
FIGURE 29 Trinity Church, Cross Section, looking East
FIGURE 30 Trinity Church, Cross Section, looking West
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THE INTERIOR
tion without its being any expense to the other members of the Church, for which they are to have the pews, subject to a tax for defraying the expenses of the Church."123 Then follow forty-six names, including Thomas Cranston, Andrew Hunter and Ben- jamin Mason, of the committee.
These bald facts of the record, with another entry about a chan- delier or "candlestick," a third about pews where the pulpit stood, and a fourth about pews to be built in the gallery, are all the docu- mentary evidence we have. Not a word is said about the buying of the land, nor is there the vestige of a contract for doing the work. This last is not so strange, since the men who had to shoulder the expense would make their own arrangements into which the church might not enter, and it has been suggested as very prob- able that the land also was privately bought and became or was allowed to become the church's property by a sort of adverse possession (Figures 29 and 30).
Mason gives the constant and universal tradition when he says: "The church edifice was cut in two, and the eastern part was moved east to the line of the street; the intervening space was filled in, making two bays in the interior and affording thirty-six additional pews. The points of juncture can easily be discovered by an ob- serving eye."124 There is, or was, a plan of the church, with its pews, in the handwriting of Daniel Ayrault, which Mason prints in a woodcut, not a facsimile.125 According to this, there would be twenty-four pews, unless those numbered from I I across the church to 94 could be called new, in which case there would be thirty.
There is a list of the pew owners with the Ayrault plan, and it is interesting to compare it with the list of the "undertakers" of the addition. Very few of these have pews.
It will be well to study this change a little. Mason's statement is generally taken to mean that the two bays were inserted in the 123 Mason, Annals of Trinity Church, p. 124. 124 Ibid., p. 125, note. 125 Ibid., p. 126.
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TRINITY CHURCH IN NEWPORT
middle of the building. All the evidence is against this, and Mason has been misunderstood. What he says is literally true, but by the eastern part must be understood simply the eastern wall of the nave and aisles.
In the garret what is now the east gable seems always to have been such-there are no marks of any studs in the tie beams until very well back toward the west. Certainly there are none on the fifth tie from the west, where we should expect them if the eastern addition was all new. There are some mortises in the third tie, but they are plainly mistakes. The east end, then, was moved east- ward.
Mason says that the joints of the inserted bays, "the points of juncture," are easily seen. One such cut appears in the main cor- nice on the outside, on the north wall, near the present conductor coming down from the gutter. This cut is vertical. There is also a sloping or mitre cut near the west side of the second column from the east on the nave side of the north gallery architrave (see the long section). This cut is a little way from the column, toward the west. Search has failed to find the other joint required by the usual theory, on the north, or any at all on the south, on the in- side. One exists on the outside south cornice.
The two eastern bays, supposed to be old, are short-only 12 or 1 3 feet on centers. The two bays said to have been inserted are each 14 feet 7 inches on centers, and in this they agree with the three western bays, which are undoubtedly old and which we should ex- pect to find agreeing with the two eastern bays if the latter are as ancient as they; that is, if the eastern bays are old ones moved to the east. They do not so agree. The panels in the faces of the gal- lery, on each side, in these two eastern bays are, of course, shorter than those in the two bays next on the west-the supposedly in- serted bays-but the three westernmost bays do not return to these short panels. As they do not agree in length with the eastern
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THE EASTERN ADDITION
bays, so they do not agree in panelling. The inference is quite plain that the five western bays, including those in the middle, sup- posed to have been inserted, are the originals; that the two eastern bays were added after the east wall had been moved to the line of Spring Street (Figure 31).
The seventy feet which Henry Bull says was the length of the old church had brought the east wall of the chancel right up to the eastern line of the Brinley lot. There was only a fixed amount of space between this line and the west line of Spring Street. The two eastern bays, therefore, which are new, were made, in length, to fit this space.
The pulpit now stands on the center line of the "middle alley," which is widened to allow a passage on either side. Thus the pews near the eastern end, on this middle alley, are narrower opposite the pulpit than elsewhere on that alley, or than those on the side alleys.
Now, if the pulpit stands where it was originally set in relation to the east wall and was moved with two eastern bays, that narrow- ing of the pews would have been the same as it now is; those pews would be unchanged. But we know that they were changed, for there is a vote, taken July 25, 1763, "by the congregation . . . that the proprietors of the pews next the pulpit, as it lately stood, may remove those in the middle alley as far as the others, at their ex- pense."1
This means that the owners of these narrow pews, formerly op- posite the pulpit, could move the sides of their pews out into the middle alley so that they would be in line with "the others," that is, with those on the west. Now, if the two eastern bays of the church, pulpit, pews and all, had been moved eastward, the orig- inal relation of these narrowed pews to the pulpit would simply have been still maintained and the pews could not have been wid- 126 Mason, Annals of Trinity Church, p. 130.
từF
FIGURE 3I Lengthwise Section of Present Church, looking North. Cellar Modern. Only Original Part of Organ Case is shown
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THE NEW STEEPLE
ened. The words "as it lately stood," used of the pulpit, would have no meaning.
On the other hand, if we assume that the pulpit was moved from its old position to a new one, farther east, in a newly added portion of the church, we can understand at once how the pew owners would wish to widen their pews, kept narrow by the alley around the pulpit, while the new pews, built at each side of the pulpit in its new place, would have to be narrow, as they now are.
The New Steeple
N OT long after the lengthening of the church the troubles of the unfortunate tower came to a crisis. It was "reported by a survey of carpenters to be very defective," and on April 7, 1768, the vestry voted that it "be pulled down, and a new one, of wood, be erected in its place."12
On Sunday, April 10, 1768, a meeting of the congregation ordered three vestrymen, Captain Evan Malbone, Captain Charles Wickham and Mr. John Bours to agree with Charles Spooner, Jethro Spooner and James Tew, Jr., to replace the old tower, and to "make a report to the congregation on Wednesday next."128 On that day the committee reported a covenant made with the three carpenters for "£9000, old tenor, or eleven hundred and fifty Spanish milled dollars." The congregation accepted the re- port and appointed the "said three persons with Mr. Stephen Ayrault, George Gibbs and Archimedes George, a committee to "oversee the said works, and enter into articles of agreement with the said persons .. . immediately."
These articles of agreement-the only ancient contract extant relating to the church-are still preserved in the original. They 127 Mason, Annals of Trinity Church, pp. 135, 136.
128 Ibid., p. 136.
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TRINITY CHURCH IN NEWPORT
provide that Charles and Jethro Spooner and James Tew, "all of Newport, House Carpenters, shall and will pull down the Old Tower of the said Church and Build a New Tower of Wood in the same place from the Foundations of the following Dimensions (that is to say) Eighteen feet eight inches square and sixty feet high to be divided into five stories also to make the Stairs inside of it to make two doors and case them and Door Heads and also case the Clock and all other things necessary as was done or apper- tained to the said Old Tower."129
This document at once raises a serious question: what of the spire ? ""T'is not in the bond!" Yet we know, from the breaking of the finial in the gale of 1761, that there was a spire on the old tower at that date. The new tower is sixty feet only in height- the carpenters did not agree to build anything above it. Nor did they agree to take down what was above it; in fact, they could not, it was down already. According to the Newport Mercury of June 15, 1767: "The Steeple of Trinity Church, being found de- fective, was on Friday last130 taken down. A lottery is granted for erecting a new one." Here "steeple" must have come to mean the spire, for the tower was still standing! The congregation did not even order it pulled down till nearly a year later.
It seems a great feat to take down the steeple in one day, but it was simply a reversal of the usual process by which the spires in those days were raised. There is traditional evidence, and there are the oral and written statements of eyewitnesses to prove that spires were generally framed by themselves inside the towers and were hoisted to the tops of the towers, generally as a whole, probably sometimes in parts.131 It is practically certain, as has just been
129 MS. contract in Church Archives.
130 June 12. The Mercury appeared on Mondays.
13I Seymour, "The Spire of Center Church, New Haven," in the Year Book of the Architec- tural Club of New Haven.
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THE NEW STEEPLE
mentioned, that the reverse process was used in the taking down of the old spire, which otherwise could not have been accomplished in a short time. That it was not impossible can actually be proved. In the nineteenth century, in 1873, Dr. Burroughs speaks of the "steeple," which was blown down in 1804 and rebuilt in 1807. He goes on: "In 1846 it was found to be in a decaying condi- tion. . . . On the 17th of August, 1847, the spire, or all above the upper windows, was raised from its fastenings and lowered from the height of one hundred and thirty feet to the pavement with- out damage or accident-'a fearful and wonderful sight,' says one who saw it."132
It must have been the intention to rebuild the whole steeple, for the General Assembly, in June, 1767, granted a lottery of twenty-five hundred dollars "for putting a new steeple upon Trin- ity Church the old one being much decayed."133 That is, the whole steeple, with tower and spire, 134 was to be rebuilt. The work was begun with the tower, which, it will be recalled, cost only eleven hundred and fifty dollars, leaving thirteen hundred and fifty to- ward the cost of the spire, which would be a good deal more than that of the tower because of the greater amount of detail, and the height at which the work must be done.
The contract provided that the tower was "to be divided into five stories." The first of these (A in the section, Figure 32), has two doors, one toward Frank Street, the other, from its treatment more important, toward the churchyard. There was no door on the west because the church owned no land in that direction be- yond a very few feet from the tower. The western space where the door would be is taken up at present by the monument to Admiral
132 Burroughs, Historical Account of Christ Church, Boston, p. 40.
133 June 8, 1767, R. I. Colonial Records, VI, 527.
134 Using the word in its seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century meaning. Apparently, in ordinary speech, in Newport in 1768, it was interchangeable with "spire" as stated in the Historical Account of Dr. Burroughs.
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I
H
H
STEEPLE
G
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X
F 5
TOWER
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E
DI
D
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GARRET FLOOR-
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C
B 2
B
18'-0".
*
A
A 1
FIGURE 32 The Stages of the Tower and Steeple, with Framing
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G
F
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THE NEW STEEPLE
de Ternay. In the older tower a part of this lower stage, according to the Ayrault plan which Mason gives, was used as the vestry. This was where the stairs to the belfry are in the present tower. The room on the north, therefore, now used as a flower room, per- haps succeeded this old vestry, and was used up to 1798, when the room at the north of the chancel was built. 135
In the middle of the space are now four posts which seem to be old. They were probably put in to carry the bell. Quite adequate preparation for them is made in the underpinning. There are two heavy oak sills for them to stand on and these rest on cross walls of stone which are now cut away on the east, possibly to allow for the entrance to the main cellar under the church from the tower stairs. Originally there was no cellar under either church or tower. While these walls may be modern, they are more probably old ones car- ried down, for they go quite deep and there is, apparently, some provision for what looks like an outside cellar entrance on the west front of the tower. If this was ever intended, it was aban- doned, and the entrance placed under the western end of the south aisle.
Apart from the partitions which shut off the stairs and the later vestry, now used as a flower room, there were till recently parti- tions running east and west between the posts of the pair on the north and between those of the pair on the south.
This first stage of the tower, A (Figure 32), is kept low so that the floor of stage B, above it, is on a level with the lowest part of the floor of the west gallery. The B stage is quite high. It is now nearly filled by the additions to the organ, which are enclosed in a case of spruce boarding. Within this are to be seen, again, the same four posts which appeared in stage A.
Above B is a very short stage C, and there was once a floor be- tween B and C, so that C and D belonged together and formed 135 Mason, Annals of Trinity Church, p. 219.
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TRINITY CHURCH IN NEWPORT
the third of the "stories" into which the builders agreed to divide the tower. The D stage, if it may be called a stage, or, at any rate, the D part of the combined C and D, comes above a girt which is level with the truss tie beams which are part of the framing of the garret floor. Cross sticks run back from the tower frame-there is no floor between Cand D, nor ever was-over the floor of the gar- ret and tie the tower to the frame of the church. In D appear once more the same posts we saw in A, in B and in C.
In E is the clock stage with its clock, still housed in from the weather, and two small round windows. The same four posts are here but they are of modern hard pine. Do they replace older posts of oak? They stop under the beams of the next stage, the bel- fry, and their purpose is, therefore, to support the bell, to carry the weight and vibration of it to the ground independently of the tower frame. It may be that the whole is an afterthought to carry the modern chimes. The appearance of age which they present in the first story seems against this view.
The belfry, stage F, is not open. It has windows, but they are closed with louver boards. This is the last stage of the tower, which, up to this point, is generally simple in its framing. At each corner a post 1 2 inches square and 60 feet long, spliced at about the mid- dle of its length, runs from the sill below A to the plate at the top of F. All the posts are tied together by girts at the different levels, including D, and are braced to these girts besides. Studs are set be- tween them and to these the boarding is nailed.
Above F is the spire. This is now a rather bewildering collec- tion of timbers put in during the course of years, replacing some sticks and strengthening others. Originally it was nearly as simply framed as the tower.
Above the main cornice, which crowns the belfry, stage F of the tower (Figures 32 and 33), there are two stages besides the spike or acute pyramid at the very top. Let us consider first the
FIGURE 33 The Spire
THE NEW STEEPLE
square stage I, with a window on each face, below this pyramid, or crowning stage, which is J in the figure. Below this stage I is a tall square mass which really contains two stages, H and G, as will be seen in the section, separated by a cornice which is seen above the balustrade over the cornice of the tower. The upper division H of this section of the spire has two round-headed openings in each of its faces, and through them can be plainly seen a square mass or core, something like that, in stone, in St. Mary le Bow. This is simply stage I carried down through stages H and G. A look at the section will explain this. Stage I could not be built directly on the top of H. It would be blown off, for in a gale, the mo- ment, or leverage, of the wind at that height about a point at the top of the tower as a fulcrum would be tremendous. The framing of I-four corner posts, about 9 inches square, with much patch- ing-is carried down in this core through stages H and G to the floor of G and was originally carried down to heavy beams in the floor of stage F, the belfry. That is, the spire was "telescoped" into the tower for one stage. The patching seems to show that this was not enough.
The framing of the combined stages H and G is carried down only to the top of the tower and, except at the level of the top of H, where the braces touch the corner posts of I, and at the floor of G, where heavy beams running east and west grip the corner post in the core, coming down from I, this framing is independent of the "telescoped" frame of I. Even these beams look suspiciously like late additions.
The manner in which the tower and the spire are framed gives some clue to the method of raising the latter. The tower was raised in the ordinary way. The front, framed on the ground, was raised as a whole, and side girts set in. Then the frame of the belfry- stages F and G-already framed and raised inside the tower, which had served as a scaffolding for its construction-was hoisted
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TRINITY CHURCH IN NEWPORT
by ropes, fastened to the tower framing, up through the tower to a point a little above its intended place and was dropped upon the supports provided under it in the ceiling of F.136 This frame, once in place, served in its turn as a derrick for hoisting the whole length of I, which, all as one frame, was passed up through it and secured to the supports in the ceiling of F. The central timber of the pyramid was then hoisted and stepped, like a mast, in the floor frame of H and stayed at the plate level of I. A few feet above this point, the actual post of the pyramid is spliced on to this tim- ber. The splice is a long one, but it seems to be in a curious posi- tion. It apparently weathered a gale in 1770, which broke off the spindle of the vane just below the upper ball.
Was the new spire a copy of the old one? It almost certainly was. The new tower was, according to the contract, the same ex- cept perhaps for the doors, a copy of the older one which was beyond repair, and there can be hardly a doubt that the spire, which had to be taken down first, having become very defective, was in even worse condition. The records show that it was the in- tention of the people to build a new steeple-tower and spire. If we consider this, knowing that they insisted on what was practi- cally a replica of the old tower, it seems reasonable to assume that they meant to repeat the old spire also.
As it stands now the work above the tower is almost exactly what the spire of Christ Church, Boston, was before the dam- age repaired by Bulfinch. Now, while the nave of Christ Church was built in 1723, the spire was not put up until 1740 or 1741. The tower of Trinity, of course, dates from 1726, but there is no possibility that the spire of the Newport church was built be- fore that in Boston. The suggestion already made is very close to the truth-after the Boston congregation had built their spire,
136 See note 131, page 96. Mr. Seymour writes of a man still living in western Connecticut who painted a spire, completed inside the tower, before it was raised.
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THE NEW STEEPLE
Newport followed it, and built, between 1745 and 1760, a spire which was substantially the same as that we now have (Figure 33).
The origin of the design is not apparent. There is no spire of Wren's or of his contemporaries which could have served as the model, and there is a sort of Jacobean flavor about it, notably in the two openings in stage G, though Wren did such things, as witness his "insouciance," as Mr. Bolton calls it, in the Abingdon Town Hall. Possibly the designer had in his mind some memory of the spire of Wren's St. Lawrence Jewry, with perhaps a vision of the pyramid at St. James's, Piccadilly, and the silhouette of St. Augustin, Old Change. But such memories were not faint. The design is not native to New England, though the working out may be. As we study it, we are almost driven to the belief that if anyone could have modified Wren's spires in this fashion it must have been Wren himself; that after all there must be something in the tradition or theory of the plans which were "in some way" obtained.
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