According to Wikipedia:

The First Baptist Church of Tarrytown is located on South Broadway (U.S. Route 9) in Tarrytown, New York, United States. It is a stone building in the Victorian Gothic architectural style dating to the 1870s. In 1983 it and its rectory were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Congregants first met in the 1840s. The first church on the present site was erected in 1847. A quarter-century later Russell Sturgis was commissioned to design the present structure, which took five years to complete, including a detailed Gothic interior. It signaled Tarrytown’s development as a suburb, especially after John D. Rockefeller and members of his family moved to the village and joined the church. They made possible some of its later enhancements, such as its landscaping and rectory, both added later.

The article later gets into greater detail on the history of the church:

The history of the First Baptist Church goes through three eras: the years of its founding and rapid growth from the mid-19th century through the Civil War, when it met in several different places; the construction of the new church and the impact of the Rockefeller family; and the years since then.

1840s–1873: Founding and early growth

In the 1840s, as Tarrytown grew eastward from the riverside where it had begun, the community became large enough to support several Protestant denominations. For Baptists of the time the nearest church was in Sing Sing, now Ossining, roughly ten miles (16 km) to the north along the Albany Post Road. A local congregation was finally organized in 1843, and recognized later that year as Beekman Baptist Church.

The next year they were able to hire a minister, and rent a building they named Beekman Chapel. Soon they had to abandon it due to financial problems, and a local Methodist minister offered his church in the meantime. Later in the year they bought a lot at Main and Washington and built their first church for $3,000 ($77,000 in modern dollars[3]). It was renamed the First Baptist Church of Tarrytown.

Six years after its founding, the new church had grown more than fivefold, to 60 members. A revival that began in 1857 under William Wines, a pastor known for his abolitionism, almost tripled the church to 172 members by the end of the Civil War nine years later.

After a year without a pastor, David Reeves, a veteran of the Confederate Army, walked all the way to Tarrytown from Alabama to take the job in 1867. The 1844 church could no longer hold the congregation. After Reeves left in 1870, the congregation began to seriously consider a new building. Before Dr. George Stone took over as pastor in 1873, the current lot had been purchased.

1873–1900: New church and Rockefeller patronage

By that time, a building committee had been formed and raised some of the money. Russell Sturgis, the architect and critic who received the commission, was at the peak of his creative years following his designs for two of Yale University’s oldest dormitories, Farnam and Durfee halls. He was also designing another Victorian Gothic religious building, Battell Chapel for the campus. As a critic he had written for the journal New Path on the virtues of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England as applied to architecture, calling for simple buildings of solid construction and expressive of purpose, qualities his First Baptist Church of Tarrytown would embody.

Sturgis worked closely with the building committee on his design. The beginning of construction had to wait until 1874 due to the financial uncertainties created by the previous year’s banking crisis. The architect’s plan adapted, calling for a five-year plan with separate construction timetables for the main block and spire. By summer 1875 enough of the foundation and walls had been laid to hold a cornerstone ceremony.

The committee began meeting in the new church a year later, and by the end of 1876 the sexton had taken up occupancy. At that time construction began on the spire. Costs of construction ultimately reached $100,000 ($2.48 million in modern dollars), well over the original budget, when the church was formally dedicated in 1881. Originally, the interior walls were completely covered by the stencilled designs that today remain only between the ceiling rafters

At the time the church stood out within Tarrytown, which had only incorporated as a village a decade earlier. Broadway was still unpaved, and the surrounding buildings were of a much smaller scale. First Baptist signalled that the village, once a riverside port town that served the farmers inland, was becoming a desirable residential suburb, a home away from the city for successful financiers and industrialists. In particular, the Gothic stylings of the church were well-suited to a community located on a river that had begun to be referred to as “America’s Rhine”. In 1888 it took delivery of its pipe organ.

Tarrytown’s cachet was secured in the following decade when John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil and the wealthiest man in America, not only at that time but historically, built his Kykuit estate north of Tarrytown and settled there with his family. The Rockefellers, especially their patriarch, had remained devout Baptists as their fortune grew.

They became members of First Baptist, and their patronage was to prove beneficial to the church. The rectory was built south of the church in 1896 through the generosity of Almira Geraldine Goodsell, wife of William Rockefeller, John’s younger brother. Other gifts from the family strengthened the church’s spiritual work and enhanced its physical appearance. At the turn of the century John D. Rockefeller himself paid for the church’s landscaping.[1]

1900–present: Later alterations

In the early 1910s the interior was converted from gas to electric lighting. Some of the original gas jets remain, and an original gas fixture, unused since then, still hangs in the base of the tower. In 1936 an electric organ replaced the original pipe organ. The stencilling on the interior was painted over in the 1950s, with the exception of the sunflower bands in between the ceiling rafters, which were too difficult to reach. At that time the rectory was also renovated, with the first-floor rooms converted to Sunday school classrooms and office space and the second floor becoming the pastor’s apartment.

The screen that creates the narthex space in the church sanctuary was brought in from another church at some point. It uses classical detailing instead of the Gothic detailing that dominates the space. Two of its eight stained glass windows are believed to be Tiffany glass.[1]

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