The Old Dutch Church, officially known as the First Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Kingston, is located on Wall Street in Kingston, New York, United States. Formally organized in 1659, it is one of the oldest continuously existing congregations in the country. Its current building, the fifth, is an 1852 structure by Minard Lafever that was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2008, the only one in the city. The church's steeple, a replacement for a taller but similar original that collapsed, makes it the tallest building in Kingston and a symbol of the city.
Lafever's building was described by Calvert Vaux as "ideally perfect". It is unique among his work as his only Renaissance Revival church that largely retains the original design, and the only stone church he is known to have built. Its interior includes stained glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany's company, and an extensive M.P. Moller pipe organ After a few early renovations, and the collapse of the higher original steeple, it has remained largely intact since 1892, although there have been continuing issues with one of the walls. One of the congregation's previous churches is across neighboring Wall Street. The church grounds also include a small cemetery with most of the burials predating its construction. Among them is George Clinton, a former governor and U.S. vice president.
The church has been active in Kingston's civic life. During the Revolutionary War George Washington paid a visit due to the church's strong support for the Patriot cause, and wrote a thank-you note exhibited in the church today. An annual dinner is held to commemorate the visit. George H. Sharpe raised a Civil War regiment at the church, and later erected a monument in the churchyard to those volunteers. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and members of the Dutch royal family, among other notables, have visited the church. It has also been the site of memorials to tragedy from the assassination of William McKinley in 1901 to the September 11 attacks in 2001.
Building The church is located on a lot at the east of uptown Kingston. It is a contributing property to the Stockade District. Main, Fair and Wall streets surround it on three sides; the north has some two-story commercial buildings. The old Ulster County courthouse is just to the northwest, across Wall. Amid a cluster of buildings on the south, across Main Street, is the building the current church replaced, now St. Joseph's Catholic church. Most of the neighboring buildings support the church's historic character, dating to the 19th or early 20th centuries.
Tall shade trees surround the building and shelter its cemetery. An iron fence with stone posts encircles most of the property. Flagstone walks lead to the primary entrance on the south side and around the building, where another one leads from the tower entrance to Wall Street.
Exterior
The building itself is faced in load-bearing locally quarried bluestone, set in a random ashlar pattern with limestone trim. It consists of a main sanctuary building oriented north–south with an east–west lecture hall wing on the north end and attached multi-stage bell tower at the northwest corner. The gabled roof is clad in raised-seam metal, with a modillioned wooden cornice. It is pierced by skylights corresponding to the exterior windows, currently covered in plastic, just above the roofline.
Fenestration on both side profiles consists of five large round-arched stained glass windows framed by molded limestone casings with bracketed sills. On the east in the center is an engaged buttress added to shore up the wall. A three-bay projecting pavilion on the west supports the bell tower. Its entrance is a single door with round-arched window above and on the sides. Its lowest stage is a three-story masonry tower with wooden cornices separating the stories, topped by three frame ones above a curved cornice. The lower two are octagonal, one featuring a clock and the next louvered round-arched vents. The uppermost stage, the conical steeple, has ribs defining its eight facts and is covered with diamond-shaped wooden shingles. Kingston's city ordinances prohibit the construction of any building taller than its base in the Stockade District.
The lecture hall addition on the north is similar to the main church block. It is a two-story bluestone structure with slate roof, mostly shielded from view by the church and adjacent buildings.
A similar projecting gabled pavilion, with battered corners, on the Main Street side frames the main entrance. Two bluestone steps with iron railings lead up to a pair of slightly recessed paneled wooden doors topped by a fanlight with tracery. The limestone surround is topped with a keystone. Limestone is also used for the corner bases and courses at ground level and continuing the cornice line at that level. Similarly appointed but smaller doors flank the main entrance.
Interior
In the narthex a small display case contains items of significance from the church's history: the first communicants' tablet, and a letter from George Washington thanking the congregation for its hospitality to him on a 1782 visit (This is reportedly his only writing during the entire eight years of the Revolutionary War that mentions any religious institution.) Across from the main entrance three round-arched doors corresponding to those on the outside lead into the main sanctuary.
The sanctuary itself is painted off-white, with the stained glass windows, red carpeting, gilding and mahogany trim of the pews providing a contrast. Corinthian columns, creating lateral arcades, provide corbeled support to groin vaults. The arcading partially encloses the balcony. A simulated clerestory level is illuminated by the skylights supplemented by electric lighting in the original wall sconces. The walls themselves are plaster on lath with beaded wainscoting ending in a chair rail.
A raised wooden platform supports the pulpit, carved with some classical motifs such as rectangular, rounded lozenges and foliation, some of it gilded, echoing the wall behind it. It has two front piers that resemble antae. On the wall above the pulpit is a Palladian Tiffany stained glass window depicting the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple framed by gilded moldings and flanked by pairs of fluted Corinthian pilasters. Bronze statues of angels are on either side.
On the south wall is a choir loft with the church's pipe organ. It is in a case with another Palladian motif and carvings similar to those in the pulpit, and also framed with fluted Corinthian pilasters. A large swan-necked broken pediment is atop the case.
The church's box pews have hinged doors, scrolled armrests and seat cushions. They all face forward on the ground floor except for the two rows in the front. On the upstairs galleries they face the opposite wall. Metal and marble memorial plaques line the walls, and a door on the northwest side leads to the tower vestibule.
Cemetery
The remainder of the church lot is given over to its cemetery. It contains around 300 headstones, many of which predate the current church. The stonework on many is detailed and high in quality. 1710 is the earliest date for which one is legible, but church records show burials as early as 1679, and some that have not yet been translated may have taken place earlier. Not all graves were marked. The most recent stone dates to 1832.
At least 70 of the stones are believed to be Revolutionary War-era veterans. George Clinton, former Governor of New York and U.S. Vice President under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, is buried here under a large obelisk in the churchyard's southwest corner. He was moved here from Washington in 1908 and reburied in a full ceremony. Another large monument to "Patriotism" in the southeast corner honors the volunteers of the 120th New York Infantry during the Civil War. It was commissioned by George H. Sharpe, a Kingston native and colonel of volunteers for the 120th.
Aesthetics
The Old Dutch Church was one of Lafever's last commissions, and considered his most fully developed application of the Renaissance Revival style. Architectural historian W. Barksdale Maynard says it "reveals an experienced architect at the height of his powers, broadening his approach beyond the Greek Revival he had done so much to popularize." The style may have also appealed to the church's congregation as a way of distinguishing itself architecturally within the city from the Second Reformed Dutch Church of Kingston, an offshoot church which had built a new Gothic Revival church nearby in 1850. It also may have been preferred as it made the church building look older than it actually was.
Lafever abandoned the classical symmetry he had used for earlier churches such as the Old Whaler's Church in Sag Harbor for the church's exterior, preferring the more Picturesque choice of putting the tower on the side. The projecting front pavilion on the Main Street side creates the appearance of superimposed gables, much like those on the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Eclecticism was another aspect of the Picturesque that showed up in Lafever's design. The battered piers at the corners give the main block and front pavilion a slight Egyptian Revival feel, as well as adding mass.
The interior of the church follows English Renaissance forms popularized by Christopher Wren and James Gibbs, particularly some aspects of the latter's St Martin-in-the-Fields, which again may have been chosen by the congregation to distinguish themselves from the Second Reformed Church. By using such a consciously English model, the church's congregation signaled the full assimilation of Dutch Americans, many of whom had continued to speak Dutch for some years after independence, into the predominantly English-influenced culture of the mid-19th century United States. He used a 3:5:7 ratio for the proportions, representing the Trinity, the human senses and the days of Creation respectively. Calvert Vaux, when declining a commission for a new pulpit at the church three decades later, called its forms and symmetry, "ideally perfect".
History
The First Protestant Dutch Reformed Church of Kingston has held worship services for 350 years, making it one of the oldest continuously existing congregations in the U.S. The current building is its fifth.
For the first 170 years of its existence it was the only church in Kingston, and the only Dutch Reformed Church for much of the west side of the Hudson River. Fifty other churches in the region were started under its auspices. Its birth, marriage and death records are complete to 1660, making it one of the oldest such collections in the country and an important resource for genealogists.
17th and 18th centuries
Like many churches, the Old Dutch Church began with informal meetings, in its case starting around May 1658, when Kingston was still known as Wiltwyck, part of the Dutch colony of New Netherland. Jacob Stoll, a local settler, led services for 11 others in his house in the absence of an ordained minister or actual building. The following year it was formally organized, and in 1660 received its first dominie, or minister, Hermanus Blom. A parsonage was built at the order of Peter Stuyvesant in 1662. It was used as a school and court as well, and possibly an Indian trading post.
Church lore holds that a crude log meetinghouse, built into the stockade that had been built around the small city, was erected near the current location in 1661, although whether it was there has been disputed. Any structure that did exist was destroyed in 1663 during the Second Esopus War. By 1680 a small stone building was in use there. Records of the time describe it as wide long and wide. A later history notes that it was extravagantly furnished for the time and place with stained glass windows bearing coats of arms.