The New Hurley Reformed Church, listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) as the Reformed Dutch Church of New Hurley, is located on New York State Route 208 roughly north of the hamlet of Wallkill, New York, United States, midway between it and Gardiner to the north, in the town of Plattekill. It is a wooden structure built in the Greek Revival style during the 1830s. In 1982 it was listed on the NRHP.
The church was established in the late 18th century, shortly before the Revolutionary War, when a flood on the nearby Wallkill River washed out a bridge that Dutch settlers in the area had used to reach services at another nearby Dutch Reformed Church. After several years, they were granted permission to establish a new church on the condition it was located away from the river. The site was purchased several years afterwards, and a primitive church built on the spot, with a parsonage and cemetery added later. For its first half-century it shared a pastor with another Reformed church in New Paltz.
It was replaced by the current building in 1835. While the Greek Revival style was used for many American churches at the time, the New Hurley church's implementation is unusually large, and visibly restrained in its use of decoration, per the austere style favored by the Reformed Church. Its front columns were created by laying brick in a circular pattern and then plastering over them to create the fluting on the exposed points.
In the early 20th century the current stained glass windows were installed; during the 1920s the aging building was renovated after a period in which church membership had declined to the point that a vote had to be taken to save it from closure. A second renovation, in the middle of the century, focused on the interior; around the same time a new church hall was built on the property to replace one that had been located a short distance away. Further work was done on the interior in the 1970s.
Building and grounds
The church is located on the east side of New York State Route 208, in the northeast corner of the three-way intersection with New Hurley Road (Ulster County Route 20). It is three miles () north of the hamlet of Wallkill and roughly the same distance south of Gardiner, the next hamlet to the north; it is almost a thousand feet south of the boundary of the town of that name. The church is in the westernmost corner of the town of Plattekill; neighboring Shawangunk, where the church's Wallkill ZIP Code is based, is on the south and west across the two roads.
The surrounding area is primarily rural in character, with a mix of woodlots, orchards and open fields. The terrain is gently rolling, mostly level on the east side of the church but descending slowly towards the Wallkill River, two miles (3.2 km) to the west in that direction. On the south side of New Hurley are two residences on large lots with mostly wooded area to their south; another large woodlot is on the west side of Route 208. To the east is the Catskill Aqueduct, part of New York City's water supply system. Around to the southwest along the highway is the combined property of Shawangunk and Wallkill state prisons.
In addition to the church, the property includes a cemetery, the oldest portion of which is included along with it in the one-acre () portion listed on the National Register, since it has many intact gravestones of locally prominent church members from the early 19th century. It fills out most of the property to the north and northeast, ending just short of the aqueduct. On the east side of the church is an asphalt parking lot, with the parsonage and church hall on its east.
Exterior
The church building itself is a rectangular wooden structure, four bays by three, , on a stone foundation. It is sided in clapboard and topped by a front-gabled roof pierced by a square bell tower near the south elevation; a brick chimney is to its northeast. A paved driveway runs across the south (front) elevation from Route 208 to the parking lot; a lengthy inclined sidewalk flanked by metal guardrails connects the front portico with the parking lot near the handicapped spaces, to provide accessibility. Mature Norway spruces on the east and southeast shade the building in that direction. A metal fence anchored to the building on both sides near the front delineates the church's cemetery.See accompanying photo, above.
Three sets of steps, the central one with metal handrails, cut in the bluestone porch provide access to the portico on the south elevation. Four round fluted Doric columns support a projecting pediment with a tympanum faced in flushboard. On the facade behind the colonnade, the curtain wall has two wide smooth square pilasters at either corner. A wooden wall is at the west end of the porch.
In between the pilasters are three wide entrances. The main entrance, in the center, is flanked with two iron lamps. Above it is a wooden plaque with "R.D. Church of New Hurley, founded 1770, rebuilt 1835" on it; the other two are topped with windows of equal size.
Both sides have four evenly spaced tall and narrow windows. A pair of bulkhead doors to the cellar is located on the east side near the south corner. On the rear there are two near the corners. The roofline is set off by two wide molded friezes divided by a narrow dentilled course and topped by a raking cornice, a treatment that continues into the broken pediment on the rear. Below the eaves on the front pediment are two plain linear nested molded friezes.
The roof is sheathed in wooden shingles. The bell tower has five stages, all faced in narrow clapboard. The first ends in a narrow molded cornice; the second, slightly smaller, ends in a much larger cornice. Above it the taller third stage has a louvered rectangular vent on each side, flanked by pilasters with a larger pilaster at each corner, all topped with mutules ending on a molded course. The fourth stage, above that, is another short clapboarded section ending in a projecting cornice, above which a short clapboarded parapet, the final stage, rises. It is topped by eight pluicles.
Interior
All three entrances, set with paneled doors, open into a narrow vestibule. They in turn open into the sanctuary, corresponding to three aisles between and aside the wooden pews, each with mahogany back rails and arm rests. At the rear of the church is a lectern on a raised platform. Behind it is an entablature screen supported by four fluted pilasters, flanked by the rear windows.
Pilasters flank all eight side windows, rising to a broad, flat cornice at the ceiling. In the space between the cornice and window sash are five wooden bosses. The space is illuminated by chandeliers hung from the ceiling. Staircases at opposite ends of the front vestibule lead up to the organ and choir where a trap door permits access to the bell tower. In the basement is a furnace.
History
The church owes its establishment to the accident of a flood along the Wallkill River denying settlers in the area easy access to what had up till then been their church. For its first half-century it shared a pastor with yet another nearby church. The current building, erected in 1835, has been in continuous use ever since.
1628–1766: Establishment of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Hudson Valley
Dutch colonists brought the Dutch Reformed Church with them to New Netherland when they began settling the Hudson Valley in the early 17th century. The first Reformed church in the colony was established in New Amsterdam (today's New York City) in 1628; the colony's capital Fort Orange (now Albany) followed in 1642.
Over the course of the century, even after the Dutch ceded the colony to Britain after the Esopus Wars, settlers and their descendants ventured out of their original communities in search of arable land in the valley. They brought the Reformed Church with them, establishing today's Old Dutch Church in Kingston in 1660 and another in what is now New Paltz in 1717. Two decades later, settlement had reached the valley of the Wallkill River and its major tributary the Shawangunk Kill below the eponymous ridge, where the towns of Shawangunk and Gardiner are today, south of New Paltz.
In those early days, the settlers had kept their faith by gathering in their houses. After more years had passed and the population became larger, this was no longer feasible, and in 1753 the Reformed Church of Shawangunk was chartered. Its church in the nearby hamlet of Bruynswick, also listed on the National Register, is the oldest building in continuous use by what is now the Reformed Church in America.
1767–1774: Establishment of the New Hurley church
At that time, the farmers in the New Hurley area were able to reach the church by means of a bridge across the Wallkill. In September 1767, a flood washed that bridge away, greatly inconveniencing those members of the congregation who lived east of the river. They appealed to the church's consistory to let them build a new church they could reach, but were rejected out of concern that a new church so close to the existing one would deprive it of members and resources, and urged the petitioners to be "patiently content with the present divine arrangement."
Two years of the arrangement did not make them any more patient. They appealed to the consistory again in 1769, but received no reply. So instead they went up to the classis which governed the area's Reformed churches. After some deliberation, a committee appointed by the classis concluded that "the aforesaid community [should] in a friendly manner be permitted to accomplish their desire to be constituted into a church." However, to avoid the potential diversion of resources from the existing Bruynswick church, the classis required that the new church be located some distance away from the Wallkill.
A majority vote of the putative congregants chose the present site for the church, as yet unbuilt. The congregation was formally established in late 1770. Three years later, the church bought the land the current structure stands on and began building the first church, using the timber felled in clearing the property to build a plain wooden structure. The building had no heat of its own—members brought their own foot stoves to keep warm during winter services.
1774–1828: Shared pastors with New Paltz
In those earliest years, the church had no pastor, laving with sporadic, mostly nonexistent records. That changed in 1775, when it agreed to share a pastor with the Reformed Church in New Paltz. The arrangement worked well enough that the two churches pooled their resources to build a parsonage three years later.
The pastor, Stephen Goetschius, had given his services in Dutch as he spoke little English. But by the end of the 18th century, English was beginning to displace Dutch as the native language of the younger residents of Dutch descent. Whether to hold services in English was a subject of much discussion in the Dutch Reformed Church of the Hudson Valley, and the New Paltz and New Hurley churches had to consider this issue as well when they sought a new pastor in the later 1790s. They hired the bilingual J.H. Meyer, who gave his sermons in Dutch first and then English every other Sunday, as the churches had decided, for the three years he held the position.
In 1811 a extension was added to the rear of the church. It thus became one of the few churches wider than it was long. The following year, the new section was nearly burned down when a celebration of Oliver Hazard Perry's victory over Britain's Royal Navy in the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812 became overzealous.
Six years later, William Bogardus came to serve as pastor of both churches. He would be the last to serve in this dual capacity, taking leave of New Hurley to become New Paltz's pastor exclusively in 1828. The following year F.H. Vanderveer became the first full-time pastor at New Hurley.
1829–1848: New buildings