Asylum Hill Congregational Church Reflects on Its Church

1908. Irvin Davis would discuss the church’s architecture on March 1, 1908.

1. “When the roof became heavy, the tall side walls could not stand the side-thrust. The Romans solved the problem clumsily by means of wooden roofs, or by making huge thick side walls, so heavy as not be pushed over by the round arch.  The Gothic, or northern, mind, in France especially, was more inquisitive and original.  These northerners introduced a pointed arch.”
2. “The earlier style is heavy; the next more geometric in its secondary details; another, yet more ornamental; with a distinctly English fourth style, nicknamed the perpendicular. And all later structures following Gothic lines have blended more or less of these English features into their composite.”
3. “This is exactly what we have done in our own structure here in Hartford. Our Gothic survivals came through this English current of development.  The quarter-foil window is found, it is true, in the Notre Dame, as also in the delicate tracery of the Cologne Cathedral.  It is a very common Gothic ornamental outline in window frames and elsewhere, but its introduction in unlooked for places as here, is what we find in the English development.”
4. “The architect of this church was an Irishman, Patrick C. Keeley. When he designed the edifice he was nearly 50 years of age.  Ten years or so later he drew the plans for St. Joseph’s Cathedral.”

Charles Cummings Stearns (1850-1924) was a professor of archaeology at the Hartford Theological Seminary and considered an expert of Christian art and Biblical history.  He also ran a school in the classics for boys.

Unattributed, “Church Architecture,” Hartford Courant, February 1, 1904, page 7.