Flow

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL, April 14, 2017:  I am writing from my hotel room in Jersey City where an easy commute to lower Manhattan has made this hard-working town posh. From my window I can almost touch the World Trade Center. It is my third night here. My friend, Gary, and I spent the day exploring Bayonne and the two long fingers that reach into the center of New York Bay. I wondered what, if anything, remained of the bay in which Henry Hudson dropped anchor, or even of the shore frequented by Yachtsmen and vacationers after the Civil War. Between 1880 and 1920 Standard Oil transformed the landscape and the two fingers are piers built in the 1930s that have long been at the center of world's shipping stream in war and peace.

As expected, this is a high-security area, and finding places to shoot the giant cranes and gantries was difficult. This is a surreal patch of Jersey wasteland, and I am amazed at the strange things one can compose into a photo that includes the World Trade Center. At one point we got tangled up in traffic where a six-lane stream of tractor trailers pulling container flatbeds was cued waiting to pick up or deliver containers. Every few seconds another six trucks would be released from the cargo gate to drive beneath the cranes for loading and unloading. The line may have been as much as 50 trucks long. We were row boats amid a convoy of freighters coming and going, and we scrambled to make a u-turn and get out of their way. We were told that this was a slow day due to Good Friday, but I have a hunch the stream of trucks flows thru here 24/7.

In the afternoon we found our way to the closed Military Ocean Terminal where roads made alleys between abandoned truck bays no longer appropriate for a world that flows through shipping containers. The road ends at the Cape Liberty Cruise Port where all was still, and on our way out we passed again between alleys of bays still as quiet as a ghost town, but as we approached the far end of the last alley of shipping bays there were festively painted, patchwork food trucks waiting, and suddenly a stream of men and women dressed from head to toe all in black flowed into the street in front of us. All was commotion as they swarmed the food trucks, and transit buses began arriving to take them away. Where had they come from? What did they do here? Where were they going? In the late day shadows their dark faces and coveralls were featureless. I thought of Niebelungen dwarves emerging from Niebelheim. It might have made remarkable pictures, but neither my friend nor I had the nerve.

Most of the day lacked the clouds that might compose desolate, flat pictures, but in the middle of the day we had found a wasteland “park” at the edge of the busy shipping complex. As I photographed amid broken culverts, industrial rubble, and a forest that was struggling to be reborn, two mockingbirds began an ever-changing musical dialogue, and as I continued making pictures I found myself singing along. When I emerged from the park back on Goldsborough Drive the clouds had shifted. Across Upper New York Bay to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, all of New York Harbor was talking to the sky.

Unwinding

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  To reach the choir loft one must dance. The fluid wind of the stair offers no hint at the awkwardness of the Fandango.

Style Sense - Woodbury North

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  I missed it initially. The First Congregational Church of Woodbury (previous TODAY’S post, 7-4-17) and the North Congregational Church of Woodbury (photographed here) are very similar in size and overall plan with similar wrap-around galleries and ceilings similarly domed between the side galleries; they are alike in form, but in style they are distinct. 

I walked north on Main Street – strolled really – from the First Congregational Church to North Congregational Church, and it took me under ten minutes. It took no longer when the two meeting houses were built nearly simultaneously between 1814 and 1818, and there is still a friendly rivalry over which building came first, but what was the need for two meeting houses in such proximity?

Petition to the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut in New Haven on the 2nd Thursday of October, A.D. 1816:

"The Petition of the subscribers, Inhabitants of the Town of Woodbury in the County of Litchfield to your Honors humbly showeth…that for forty years past unhappy dissensions have prevailed in said town respecting the location of a meeting house for the use of the located Ecclesiastical Society in said town, which is coextensive with the limits of sd town…." [The petition continues by explaining the history of the dispute.]

“Dissensions!” The petition makes clear the history of attempts to build a new meeting house. It is a dispute repeated in towns all over Connecticut as communities swelled following the Revolution. Just as growth pushed new settlers to plantations on the fringes of established communities where they established daughter churches, similar growth enlarged the membership of the mother church as well. 

By 1795 Woodbury's second meeting house was inadequate for the swelling population. New settlers opened land in the north and made it valuable, while the original settlement at the south end of town had hardly changed. In 1795 a new central location was suggested and, the 1816 petition tells us the central site was, “approved… by a large majority" of the church membership, but disapproved by two-thirds of members allowed to vote. In spite of this, the central location was quickly approved by the Court of Litchfield, but no church was subsequently built.

By 1813 there were even more settlers in the north. Some had built sawmills and gristmills along the Weekeepeenee River in the section known still as Hotchkissville, and a new application was submitted approved, and still no church was built. In 1814 the dissenting northern settlers, having raised their own money, began building their church on the twice-approved site. However, in 1816 it was still illegal in Connecticut to have two churches of the same denomination in a single town. We’re told that in order to get around this law, the congregation submitted the 1816 petition distinguishing its theology by calling itself the "Strict Congregational Society.” We’re told they wrote it inside the meeting house they still had no permission to build. 

What might we read into the Congregation’s chosen name at a time when religious awakening had gotten a second wind, and men like Lyman Beecher were taking up the old, fiery rhetoric and emotional appeal that had languished during a half century of strife with England and through the struggle to establish upon rational principles an independent nation out of thirteen squabbling colonies? Does the name “Strict Congregational Society” imply anything about how northern dissenters viewed of their neighbors, long established at the other end of town? 

And what part was played by Connecticut’s new Constitution which became the law of the state in 1818 taking the town out of the church’s business and the church out of the town’s? If nothing else, there was a new reason to move the church from the town’s green; was that change to everyone’s liking?

But mostly, what should we make of those differences of architectural style? The First Congregational Church is richly detailed with fluted square columns that carry the gallery rail, which is divided into framed panels and supports a second set of round columns topped by crisp ionic capitals that hold up the roof. The elaborately carved altar is framed by paired, fluted ionic pilasters carrying a tripartite entablature and a broad, ornately carved arch. The church is a virtuoso display of the woodcarvers craft and of Classical detailing that catches our eye and imprints human proportions on every surface of the large space. 

In contrast, North Congregational Church is simple, chaste, without hand-crafted classical references, and the meeting space is dominated by eight, round, floor to ceiling columns, like ship’s masts, that swaddle the congregation as they lead eyes upward. How much significance might we place on such differences in style? Pastor Sandy told me the eight columns were a special gift from a member of the congregation, and that they were made by Mystic, CT, ship builders and hauled up into the hills by oxen. It’s a story worthy to have been passed across two centuries.

"…{I}t is Resolved by this Assembly that the Petitioners and their Associates be… incorporated into a distinct ecclesiastical Society by the name of the Strict Congregational Society of the town of Woodbury… And whereas said society has the same limits and boundaries as said First Ecclesiastical Society.

"And the inhabitants of said Town, and those who may hereafter become inhabitants thereof, or residents therein, may elect to which of said society he, she, or they will belong agreeable to the provisions of the thirteenth section of the act entitled “An Act, for forming, ordering, and regulating Societies.” And any of the members of the respectful Societies, shall have liberty at any time hereafier within the month of March annually to leave the society to which he or she may then belong, and attach him or herself to and become a member of the other society by enrolling his or her name as aforesaid with the Clerk of the Society to which he or she may attach him or herself, and shall thereupon be exempt from being taxed for the future expenses of the Society which he or she may have so left as aforesaid."

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Special thanks to Kathy Logan, Marty and Rev. Sandy Koenig of North Congregational and  Maria Platt and Rev. Howard Mayer for assistance and permission to photograph.

North Congregational Toward Altar

First Congregational Toward Altar

Blossoming (A July 4th Meditation)

"Early in the spring of 1673, fifteen members of the Second Church of Stratford, Connecticut, and their families left their comfortable homes in that community to set out for “the wilderness of Pomperaug” Gothen’s History of Ancient Woodury tells the familiar story. They were to follow the Pootatook [Housatonie] River to t.he point where a large stream, the Pomperaug, flowed into it from the north and then travel up that stream a short distance to their destination; but thinking the Pomperaug too small to answer the description given them, they went on to the Shepaug. Tuming north at that point, they soon found themselves in rugged country quite different from the valley they were seeking, and they realized that they had overshot their mark. There was nothing to do but to turn back east. This they did and so reached Good Hill from which “they perceived the valley of the Pomperaug lying below in solitude and silence.” Cothren goes on to tel] 115 that at this point. Deacon john Minor fell on his knees, leading the weary but thankful little band of pilgrims in prayer, “invoking the blessing of Heaven upon their enterprise, and praying thattheir posterity might be an upright and godly people to the latest generation.”

[Retelling by Marion Kilpatrick in her history of the First Congregational Church of Woodbury]

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Puritan values settled Connecticut, and evolving struggles of Puritan values governed it from the meeting house of each new outpost the Congregationalists settled. The Puritans who came to America in the 1630s came in search of a place where local congregations of the elect might purify religion by freeing it of control by a remote church hierarchy. They sought to live where their church would be run by the congregants rather than the minister. Even the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut might advise local Congregations but not overrule them.

The descent of “daughter" congregations blazed a trail into wilderness Connecticut where pioneers cleared the land for cultivation, as they also built the first meeting house and school. At the outer edge of colonization the pioneers were drawn by the opportunity of new, prime land; at the inner edge they often left the mother congregation out of differences on issues of governance or doctrine. As trees were felled a culture and values evolved.

The first meetinghouse was built in Woodbury in 1681 by Puritans from Stratford. The success of the Woodbury settlement brought newcomers just as it had done in Stratford. A half century later the newcomers quest for new land would give birth to daughter churches in Southbury (1731), Bethlehem (1738), Washington (Judea, 1741) and Roxbury (1743). However, from the beginning newcomers brought questions of who was eligible to receive the rights of and membership in the purified congregation. Among the newcomers there were Anglicans, Baptists, Sinners and Scoundrels; occasional Quakers and Jews, and a few “indians” and “negroes,” and some sought the church’s sacraments and spiritual guidance. 

Who among these new immigrants would be admitted into the community of “the elect”? Stratford was settled c.1639 by Puritans from England, and it was the question of new membership that divided them. A minority faction favored something called the Halfway Covenant. It offered Baptism and membership to those who failed to convince the church members of the truth of their conversion. However, it refused them voting rights, wine, wafer or admission to the community of the elect. 

The First Church of Woodbury began life in 1670 as the Second Church of Stratford when they were unable to either resolve their differences or to share the existing meeting house. Although granted the right to build a second congregation and meeting house in Stratford, by 1672 the leaders of the minority faction were also granted "liberty to erect a plantation at Pomperoage,” establishing the First Church of Woodbury. From the earliest days of colonization the question of newcomers has divided us.

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[My thanks to Rev. Howard Mayer and to Maria Platt for allowing me to photograph inside the First Congregational Church of Woodbury and for the excellent history of the church written by Marion Kilpatrick, published by the church in 1994.]