South Presbyterian Church - History

History

As a congregation, South Presbyterian Church dates to 1820. At that time Dobbs Ferry was merely a small cluster of buildings around a junction on the Albany Post Road, and there were no churches. On Sundays devout locals met in the largest building then in town, the barn on Peter Van Brugh Livingston's estate, to attend services conducted by travelling Presbyterian or Methodist ministers. Three years later, the group formally incorporated as South Presbyterian Church, to distinguish themselves from a North Presbyterian Church in the nearby hamlet of Halls Corners.

In August 1823, six congregants bought a 1-acre (4,000 m2) triangle of land at the present junction of Storm Street and Ashford Road. The small church built on the property was made of local timber and painted white in the style of New England rural churches. It was known as the Little White Church for years afterwards. Today it is gone and a Lutheran church stands on the site, but the original cemetery, known as the Little White Cemetery, remains.

Two years later, in 1825, the church was officially received by the Presbytery of New York. That body censured the church six years later when discord broke out after Van Brugh Livingston, its original benefactor, tried to require that anyone joining the church sign a temperance pledge agreeing to abstain from distilled beverages. He resigned as an elder afterwards.

The church continued to grow over the next few decades, and by the 1860s it had 140 members. All agreed it was time for a new church building. James Wilde, one of the wealthier members, located and bought for the church the current property, closer to the center of the growing village, in 1864. Julius Munckowitz, an architect about whom little is known outside South Presbyterian Church save his early membership in the American Society of Architects (a predecessor to today's American Institute of Architects) and his later tenure as supervising architect of the New York City Department of Public Parks, designed the church, and the cornerstone was laid in 1868.

As with the original church, construction was done by congregants (or their businesses) using local materials. The granite was supposedly quarried and cut near the old church. Local firms also did the carpentry and masonry. Individual members donated their labor, money or both. When the new church was dedicated on the last Sunday in 1869, it had every modern convenience of the day, including gas lighting. The manse, begun that year

Wilde had originally built the stone house as a retirement home, but never used it for that purpose. He instead conveyed it to the Misses Masters, founders of the nearby Masters School. In 1916 the school turned it over to the church, which began using it as a parish hall.

The church has been improved twice with the addition of stained glass in the sanctuary lancet windows. In 1914, it was J. Gordon Guthrie, a congregant, who also did the rose window in the rear. He used as his models for the women depicted three fellow congregants. Fifty years later, in 1964, it was J.M. Baransky of nearby Yonkers who did the non-figurative pastel stained glass in the central section.

The original pipe organ was replaced in 1928, on a new balcony, by the current model, formerly in use at Manhattan's Central Presbyterian Church. The bell dates to 1876, when it was cast by the Troy foundry of Meneely & Kimberly. The connecting wing between the church and Wilde House was erected in 1954, but attempts were made to keep it architecturally sympathetic to the older buildings.