‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli, Dawn Sterner and Pam Stutz.
Without the Congregational Church of New Canaan, there would be no Town of New Canaan.
In the first decades of the 18th century, residents of Norwalk and Stamford pushed north seeking additional land, and on May 13, 1731 Puritans living in present-day New Canaan obtained authorization from the Connecticut General Assembly to form the ecclesiastical society of Canaan Parish.
Why “Canaan”? As Mary Louise King wrote in her impressive 1981 history of our town, “Portrait of New Canaan”:
Neither then nor in later years did anyone record when, how and why “Canaan” was chosen as the parish’s name. Despite their reliance on the Old Testament, Congregationalists were not obliged to give Biblical names – witness Middlesex (now Darien), Stanwich (part of Greenwich), and Wilton, three nearby parishes which took English names.
On July 1, 1731, the Parish founders established the Society of Canaan to pave the way for the proposed Canaan Parish Congregational Church, and to raise money need to build a meeting house (“Of a suitable heighth for one tere of galleries”).
In October of 1731 the colonial legislature oversaw the selection of a site for the meeting house, which ended up being the piece of land that is now the intersection of Park Street and St. John Place. The Town of Norwalk deeded that lot to Canaan Parish in April, 1732, and construction commenced on a thirty foot by thirty foot meeting house.
Separation of church and state? Not quite. To fund the meeting house, the Society laid a tax on all Canaan Parish property owners of 10 pence on the pound, in order to pay for lime for plaster, glass for the windows, and timber “for ye seats and pulpit.”
Interestingly, that tax fell on those few Canaan Parish residents that were followers (outwardly or otherwise) of the dreaded Church of England. As head of that Church, King George II had heard enough about Connecticut’s notorious partiality to the Congregational Church (in 1657, for example, the colony had outlawed “Heretics, Infidels and Quakers” – that is to say anyone not a Congregationalist).
On orders from London, in 1727 the General Assembly passed a law granting equal status to the Church of England with the Congregationalist Church. This meant that any man who proved he “conveniently” attended Church of England services could have the tax he paid to support the local Congregational minister turned over to the nearest Church of England church, underscoring that there’s nothing quite like the intersection of religion and politics.
On June 20, 1733, twenty-four residents of the Parish officially entered into a covenant to formally organize the congregation and call the Revered Els as their first minister.
Today’s Congregational Church is actually the third meeting house; a larger structure (fifty by forty) was built on the site of the original meeting house in 1752, and in 1843 the current church, lauded as one of the “loveliest churches in New England”, was built just yards up Park Street on the apex of God’s Acre (its’ own history, including recently, worthy of a separate There and Then).
The Congregational Church is the second-oldest standing church in New Canaan. The oldest church (1833) is the Lutherans’ St. Michaels to the immediate north, owned by the New Canaan Museum & Historical Society, and formerly St. Marks, the original home of … the Church of England.
Nice read Nick Williams.
Nick, Well done!