Sacred Downcycling
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #129
I’ve passed this building on New Jersey Route 31, in Glen Gardner, countless times. It has never, in all the years I’ve known it, been a church:
It’s currently the headquarters for an awning installation company—a pretty ordinary and secular end use for such a structure.
I did a bunch of internet searching, but I could find absolutely nothing about the building. So I looked up the property record, and I found this:
So it’s been in the Gilling family since 1992—and Brian Gilling, the current owner, is also the head of the awning company.
But it’s that first sale that gives a clue—”Lodge Temple Association” is, I assume, the Freemasons, meaning this building served as a Masonic lodge at one point. However, it lacks the distinctive Freemason emblem carved into the front, so it was not built by the Masons.
So I emailed the awning company and asked! The person who answered told me, to his knowledge, that it was built in 1858 and was originally a Presbyterian church. And his name was Brian. Cool!
I couldn’t confirm the 1858 number. But a little more searching did confirm the Presbyterian church. Here’s a postcard from 1909. Does that church look familiar?
It lost its spire and it’s set of three mini spires on the left. It looks a bit fancy for Presbyterian, based on my impression of that denomination, but then even Baptist churches were very grand in those days.
See those two houses to the right of the church? The middle one is gone, and so is that one up on the hill. But look at the street view now:
There it is. Over 100 years old. There’s an auto garage just to the right of that house, which wasn’t there in the early 1900s. But broadly, this landscape has hardly changed in over a century.
Some people like it that way. Way out here, in the country—I won’t say I mind.
Related Reading:
Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 700 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!
Always a fan of your sleuthing, Addison!