The New Jersey Churchscape
The New Jersey Churchscape: Encountering Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Churches is a book and website written by Frank L. Greenagel.[1]
The book was published by Rutgers University Press in 2001 and covers synagogues and meeting houses as well as churches.[2]
It took five years of research and covers 225 buildings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, presenting photographs along with commentary.[3] As the New York Times observes, what's striking is the diversity of religious structures in New Jersey, a state that "was always more religiously diverse than New England." And yet, the Times continues, the book still provides us with the sense of a "typical New Jersey church."[3]
In total, there are approximately 1,400 churches, synagogues and meeting houses in New Jersey that were built before 1900. Greenagel continues to photograph and research them, and is in the process of publishing a complete, county by county inventory of all the surviving 18th- and 19th-century churches in the state. Hunterdon, Morris, Somerset, Sussex, and Warren Counties have been completed as of 2007.
References
- ↑ L. P. Nelson (May 2002), "Review: The New Jersey Churchscape", Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries (American Library Association), retrieved 2013-01-23,
Greenagel has produced an illustrated gazetteer to New Jersey's early places of worship. The three main chapters--each dedicated to one of the state's three regions, the Hudson River, the Delaware River, and the Raritan Valley--present 225 places of worship.
- ↑ "The New Jersey Churchscape". Rutgers University Press. Retrieved 2007-08-26.
- 1 2 "First Comes the Church". New York Times. January 13, 2002. Retrieved 2007-08-21.
... Mr. Greenagel spent five years researching and photographing many of the state's 1,100 churches from the 18th and 19th centuries, and his book includes 225 of them with commentary.