30 August—The First Congregational Church of Litchfield is reputed to be the most photographed church in New England. I call it my church and admire its graceful lines every time I leave my driveway. The Greek Revival building is the church’s third meetinghouse. Although Lyman Beecher preached his Presbyterian Calvinist Trinitarian (anti-Unitarian) temperance to the congregation, it was not in this building, because he had moved on to Boston three years before it was erected in 1829.

Skipping through the building’s history, after the Civil War, Henry Ward Beecher, Lyman’s son and the church’s minister, whose taste was in his mouth, criticized the elegant building: “There is not a single line or feature in the old building suggesting taste or beauty.”

So the defamed building was moved a short distance down Torrington Road (Rte. 25 when I arrived in Litchfield, now Rte. 202), without its steeple, to make way for a new church building. The fourth meetinghouse, completed in 1873, was a Victorian Gothic-style structure, with stained-glass windows, dark pews and pulpit furniture—not unlike the town’s former United Methodist Church building, now occupied, desecrated, and sped down the path of deterioration by the malevolent Chabad Lubavitch of Litchfield County Inc.

In 1930, as part of Litchfield’s colonial revival (which persists to this day, except for the right people and Marcel Breuer lovers), the building, which had been used at various times as a dance hall, armory, movie house, gymnasium, and skating rink, was reconstructed on the north side of the East Green and rededicated “for the town’s use in public worship.”

The First Congregational Church of Litchfield celebrated its tricentennial (i.e., 300-year anniversary, in subliterate modern usage) last year, with its 28^th pastor in the pulpit, Rabbi Peter Oliveira. And I’ll leave it there.

Last time I was actually inside the handsome church must have been about two decades ago when I defended Chander Saint’s cockamamie plan to move Harriet Beecher Stowe’s birthplace (Lyman Beecher’s house) on principle and roused the ire of most of the townspeople there. As far as I know, the deconstructed house is languishing and probably decomposing in trailers while Chandler tries to find financing. He evidently couldn’t sell it on Ebay.

So here’s a great photograph with magnificent spherical aberration by Ted Roth of the Congregational-Messianic Jewish church’s elegant interior, looking down from the pulpit.