The Little Church Around the Corner the Civil War and the Draft Riots: Photo Tour

Pat Young

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
Featured Book Reviewer
Joined
Jan 7, 2013
Location
Long Island, NY
The Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration on 29th St. in Manhattan is known to all New Yorkers as "The Little Church Around the Corner." Although it is famous as "The Actors' Church", it has several important connections to the Civil War Era.

The church itself was designed in the style of a country church in 14th Century England.
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I'll post all my pictures over the next hour, along with a look at the Civil War connections.
 
The church was started by Rev. Dr. George Hendric Houghton in 1848. He served as pastor for the next 49 years. Houghton wanted to serve the city's poor, particularly its growing Irish and German immigrant communities. His church's founding coincided with the first great wave of immigration. Although the church yard has a wonderfully peaceful look, he set up a soup kitchen to feed the poor.

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Rev. Dr. George Hendric Houghton was a follower of the Oxford Movement, which tried to move the Anglican churches towards a more Catholic approach to the liturgy as well as focusing on good works as a path towards redemption. Churches from this movement tended to follow pre-Reformation lines of Anglo-Catholicism.

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Construction of the church began in 1849 and was completed in 1864. Father Houghton was not happy with the location. He wanted to work with the poorest of the poor and 29th St. and Fifth Ave. were many blocks from the immigrant neighborhoods. He became even more upset about the site chosen by his board of directors as the neighborhood gentrified in the decade and a half during which it was being built.
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Lest you think this is a bucolic country setting, that is the Empire State Building rising in the center of the picture. It is just three blocks away.
 
The church, when finished in 1864, was large enough for 1,000 people. Work continued for forty more years on a number of support buildings, including the litch, an outdoor structure where caskets were set before entering the church for funerals.
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The Little Church is one of the most peaceful spots in Midtown. I stopped there today to eat my sandwich amidst its flowers and fountain. In 1863, though this church yard was filling with African Americans fleeing the neighborhoods they shared with Irish immigrants at the start of the Draft Riots.

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The church's history records what happened next:

Warned by the police that they
would not and could not protect him from the mob should they attack
the Church, Dr. Houghton refused
to surrender the refugees to the mob. When the
mob did appear at the church Dr. Houghton lost his
temper. He shook his fist at them and shouted:
“You white devils, you!
Do you know nothing of the
spirit of Christ?”
 
The church got its nickname in 1870 out of an incident related to its final connections to the Civil War. Here is Wikipedia's version, which is the one I grew up with as well:

Actors were among the social outcasts whom Dr. Houghton befriended. In 1870, William T. Sabine, the rector of the nearby Church of the Atonement, which is no longer extant, refused to conduct funeral services for an actor named George Holland, suggesting, "I believe there is a little church around the corner where they do that sort of thing." Joseph Jefferson, a fellow actor who was trying to arrange Holland's burial, exclaimed, "If that be so, God bless the little church around the corner!"
 
P.G. Wodehouse was married here. In the late 19th Century and early 20th, the church became a favorite place for marriages and it drew criticism for marrying non-parishioners who enjoyed its doctrinal conservativism and political liberalism. Someone wrote that it was such a place for lovers that many a life began from marriages entered into here.
 
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