The Calvary Baptist church in Parkerton (Ocean County) is an interesting building—a nicely-proportioned wooden-frame building that draws on the late Gothic idiom—lancet windows, fish-scale shingles, a sharply-pointed tower set to one side, even the complex footprint. And it stands pretty much apart from other buildings which gives it a prominence it might lack were it set among the standard mix of commercial and residential structures of a small town. I hope it would surprise most regular readers to learn that the core of the church was erected between 1815 and 1820. And by a Methodist congregation. A couple blocks away. About 1868 the West Creek Methodist Episcopal church sold their wooden meetinghouse to the Calvary Baptist congregation. It had served that Methodist congregation for more than 40 years, and now, much enlarged and modified has served the Baptist congregation for almost 150 years. I like the building and its story very much.

But it also causes me a problem. Is it an 1820s meetinghouse or an 1870s church? In the work I am preparing on the churchscapes of the Jersey Shore I have placed it in the 1870s; to do otherwise would mislead anyone trying to get a sense of the architectural development of this state. But I had to consider that decision for a moment; I have received more than a few e-mails from perturbed readers who insist their church (not Calvary) was founded, or built, say, four years earlier than the date I have published. Such things matter to some people.

Churches have undergone so many modifications and renovations there is scarcely an eighteenth-century building that one can point to as authentic—Oldwick's Zion Lutheran would not be recognizable to any time-traveler from the 1750s—gable, not hipped roof, entrance moved from the long side to the gable end, Gothic arch entrance, and so on. Even the oldest church in the state, St Mary's in Burlington, has undergone dramatic changes in its plan, well-documented by the HABS drawings. There are literally dozens of ancient parish churches in England that have reworked Saxon, Norman, and early Gothic buildings repeatedly and with little concern for historical accuracy. With such a surfeit of churches and chapels there seems little urgency to establish the oldest or the first or the last remaining. That is not the situation here. There are many congregations that go to some length to claim as much antiquity as possible—the first church in the county, the oldest one to hold continuous services in English, and similar assertions of primacy. If there is a remaining eighteenth-century wall, as there is in the Old School Baptist church in Hopewell, is that enough reason to place it in an eighteenth-century chronology—probably not. The fantasy Gothic towers and crenelations of St. Michael's church in Trenton are a product of the mid-nineteenth century, but there are Trentonians who insist the church was erected in 1753. And indeed, there probably are surviving portions of the church that date to that period. To place St. Michael's in a mid-eighteenth century sequence would not only be an anachronism, it would obscure the continual and widespread process of remodeling, renovating and extending the churches of the state.

I raise the issue here, although it is of little matter to readers of this website where no structure or organization order is imposed; use the locate/search function on the left and type in the name of the church, the town, county, denomination, or even an architectural element that is featured in the write-up and you will get a list of all the churches that share that single attribute. Simple enough. Ah, but when it comes to writing a book, the issue cannot be dodged—there has to be some reason for the sequence of churches when one follows another and precedes a third. Throw the buildings in randomly and you will impair the book's potential to impart an interesting generalization.

In the 10 counties I have published (or largely completed) I have chosen to use the date of construction as the organizing principle. It provides the best sense of the development of architectural styles, traditions, and the uses that such buildings were called upon to serve, and thus it is perfectly congruent with my underlying objective—to explain why the churches look the way they do in terms of social, cultural, economic, liturgical and other factors. Basements, for example, generally appeared only after the rise of the Sunday school movement, when they were occasionally dug under the existing jacked-up church; auditoriums are placed on the second floor after churches began to be extensively used for a multitude of civic, social, even athletic activities that took up the whole of the first floor. The elaborate brackets that in antebellum years suggested a great deal about the social prominence and financial resources of the owner begin to appear on every other modest wooden-frame Methodist church in the backwaters of the state after the Civil War—steam-powered milling equipment made mass production of brackets within the means of even the most pecuniary-challenged congregation. So the appearance, or disappearance of a particular feature offers (and sometimes teases us with) clues to the congregation's values and sensitivities.

Architectural elements and styles usually provide good markers or clues to the social, ethnic, financial and liturgical sense of a congregation. Architectural style provides a handy tag to describe a church and to place it in a rough chronology; we cannot escape those tags, and the consequent emphasis on style, at least as an organizing concept. But a cautionary note is necessary—although the architectural style of a building is often the first thing that catches our eye, style is only a starting point in assessing the significant factors when describing the churchscape of a region.

Buildings are messy. The facades of most buildings conceal complex histories,—histories which we can begin to unravel by examining style in conjunction with other features, such as form or construction. Style provides only one of several clues to a building’s past.

Visual evidence is often the most powerful, and so I generally try to place a building in a sequence based on its dominant external elements. Parkerton's Calvary Baptist/West Creek Methodist is no longer an 1820s building—the belfry, the complex footprint, entrance, fish-scale shingles and Gothic-arch windows place it in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and to find it in between two simple wooden-frame meetinghouses of an earlier era would be an anachronism; though easily-enough explained, such placement creates, and perhaps leaves a wrong impression. To put it in the 1870s places it in an appropriate visual context, and one can use the text to explain that an original meetinghouse was constructed, sold, moved and later expanded and reworked does no injustice—in fact, that very act of reusing a building that a congregation has discarded, moving it and reworking it is an important part of the explanation of why the churches look the way they do.

When considering the “dominant external elements” I usually ignore the addition of a tower or entry vestibule—people can look beyond those in examining the photos and see what the building's mass was before those additions. Similarly, the addition of stained glass windows, or even, for example, the rebuilding of the nave of Trinity Church in Newark that replaced the compass arch windows with the more fashionable Gothic arch of the period is not difficult to handle, especially in that case where the front façade is so obviously a James Gibbs-derived element (directly from his plan for St. Martin-in-the-Fields), that to place that church in a sequence consistent with reconstruction of the nave would be a serious error.

There are a number of churches where the asserted date of construction is at odds with the architectural elements and style, usually because the extent of a rebuilding or renovation is not clear. The First Presbyterian church in Cedarville (Cumberland County) looks like it belongs to a Civil War or later period—its Greek Revival elements have been transformed in a manner consistent with buildings erected between 1855 and 1885. We know there were additions and renovations in 1851 and 1884, but the church claims 1838 as the date of construction. I accept 1838, and have placed it in that period, but I do not believe the façade of the church is earlier than 1850, and very likely a decade or more later. The small frame Methodist church in Leesburg (Cumberland) has an octagonal apse and an offset tower that were added in 1882 to the original 1864 building. That causes no one any difficulty, but the Methodist church in Jacobstown (Burlington) claims to have been built in 1846 and “renovated” later. “Completely rebuilt” might be a more appropriate description. The L-shaped plan, almost certainly by Philadelphia architect Benjamin Price, is an excellent example of how elements from the Gothic idiom were worked into small wooden-frame buildings in the 1880s.

A chronological pattern of organization is not the only way to impose some structure on 50 or 100 old meetinghouses and churches in a county, but if one's motivation is to explain the traditions, the social, cultural and liturgical factors that affected the plan and design of the churches, it appears to be the most productive. But an effort must be made to get the dates right, and that's not always as easy as it may seem.

New Book: A Brief History of the Religious Architecture of New Jersey 1703-1900 has recently been published and is available at Amazon. It is loaded with full-color illustrations representing the significant architectural designs in the state. It is authoritative but not scholarly in style, and was written for the average reader with an interest in the old meetinghouses, churches and synagogues of the state. Here's a direct link to its page on Amazon. You can find out more about it at the Wooden Nail Press website.

Steeple Envy is the title of my current work in process—the history of the churchscape of Morris County, and I expect it will be available during the third quarter of 2011, probably to be issued together with the work on Essex County, tentatively titled A Mighty Architectural Shout. Together the two total more than 800 pages, and the research is going more slowly than anticipated, mainly because I'm trying to finish the books on Burlington, Cumberland and Salem.