Baptist Society to build church on Asylum Hill

The Courant reported on May 24, 1871 that a group of men had bought the land at the corner of Sigourney Street and Asylum Avenue from George Affleck.

Although the article began with the news about the Asylum Avenue Baptist Society’s plans for a new church building, it quickly became a diatribe on the current state of ecclesiastical architecture in Hartford.

• “There are several other churches which were imported from Europe, to order, but without taking the measure of the congregations which were to use them, and the whole invoice has not yet arrived – the steeples are looked for daily. It is true, they may never come; and it may be the secret intention of some of our extreme protests to bring the Gothic in disrepute in this way, and to show the formalistic world that we not only can do with a church without a bishop but with a church without a steeple.”
• “What seems to us the most essential part is the audience room: the place where the congregation are to sit, in social worship, near enough together and in such contiguity and sight of each other as to feel like a congregation of brethren, and not like scattered sheep of the house of Israel, sprinkled about in vast spaces of pews and peeping from behind pillars; the place in which the preacher can see his congregation and feel the magnetism of their presence, and in which he can be heard, where indeed he can be heard speaking in a tolerably elevated voice.  In such churches as those we are writing of, if the congregation cannot see the minister and hear him without difficulty, the meeting can do little effectively when the congregation is altogether at arm’s length.”

The cornerstone for the new church building would be put in place on October 14, 1871.

1. “The situation is an admirable one, and any building erected thereon will be conspicuous. Everybody in the city, therefore, is concerned in having a tasteful church there, and the congregation who are to worship in it are concerned that it shall be a commodious place to worship in the rites of their communion, as well as a slightly building.”
2. “We shall watch with interest the building on the corner of Asylum avenue and Sigourney Street.”

Unattributed.  “Church building,” Hartford Daily Courant, January 9, 1871, page 2.