page_title: St. Andrew's Episcopal Church (Brewster, New York)
section_title: 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: St. Andrew's Episcopal Church (Brewster, New York) / History / 19th century
caption_attribution_description: English: Original wooden building used by St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Brewster, NY, USA.
context_page_description: St. Andrew's Episcopal Church is located at the corner of Prospect and Michael Neuner streets in Brewster, New York, United States. The congregation dates, informally, to 1872, though it was not formally accepted into the American Episcopal Church until ten years later. The building itself was finished in 1903, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998.
  It is the third church built on the site. Seth Howes, a wealthy congregant, offered to pay for the construction of a stone church to replace the first structure, a wooden church. He hired architects Edward Pearce Casey and Arthur Durant Sneden to design a church that recalled the English country churches that were among the first to use the Gothic Revival architectural style. However, this structure burned down within months of being finished and was immediately replaced. The current building features stained glass by Calvert & Kimberly, former students of Louis Comfort Tiffany. The chancel window, dedicated to Howes, is thought to be the work of Tiffany. The main part of the church has not been altered since its completion, although an addition was built in 1961.
context_section_description: In 1872 a group of Brewster townspeople began meeting in what was then the new town hall to hold Sunday school. These continued for eight years until that building burned down in 1880. A Brewster native and founder, Seth Howes, who had returned home to retire after becoming wealthy as a circus entrepreneur and Chicago-area developer, led the congregation in building a small wooden church on the current land. It was opened in 1881; the following year it was formally incorporated and admitted to the Episcopal Diocese of New York, marking the beginning of the church and its parish as a formal entity.
  In the next decade, the church established two chapels in nearby rural communities (they were eventually reunited with the church when the land on which one stood was acquired by New York City for one of its reservoirs in the area). Howes, who had been building and expanding his Morningthorpe estate south of Brewster, offered to pay for the building of a newer, more stylish church with surplus stone from that construction job.
  He hired Edward Pearce Casey, best known at the time for his work on the Library of Congress's Thomas Jefferson Building (as it is now known), and Arthur Durant Sneden, then chief designer for the New York City Board of Education. Casey sketched out the main plan of the building and Sneden concentrated on the details. At the insistence of Howes, who had traveled abroad and was fond of English country churches, they hewed to that model.
caption: 1881 wooden church building
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