Trinity Church in Princeton will ring its carillon bells 175 times to mark each year of its existence, in celebration of its 175th anniversary on Sunday, May 11.
Trinity will host a special service at 10 a.m., with a sermon by Princeton University Episcopal Chaplain Steve White, followed by a lunch on the front lawn of Stockton Street. Also during the service, Trinity will pay tribute to its non-stipendiary clergy.
A handful of local residents, including a number with southern connections, founded Trinity in 1833, building a modest Greek Revival meeting hall as their church. Miller Chapel, on the Princeton Seminary campus, is a similar building by the same local architect-builder, William Steadman, who also designed many houses in the neighborhood.
In 1870 the original structure gave way to a larger, more assertively Episcopalian building designed in the Gothic Revival style by Richard Upjohn and his son. This remained until the first decade of the last century, when architect Ralph Adams Cram doubled the nave in length. In 1914, Mr. Cram was hired again to create a small chapel in the north transept (the Lady Chapel), a larger French Gothic chancel, and a significantly heightened tower accommodating a small carillon. With some interior alterations, this is today’s church building.
In 1850, the church built a gothic schoolhouse, now attached to the parish house and serving as offices, to serve as a Sunday school for parish children and at other times as a school for black children, whom the local schools did not serve. In the second half of the 19th century, Trinity founded several nearby missions, of which two survive independently, Trinity Church in Rocky Hill and St. Barnabas in South Brunswick.
Starting in 1870, Trinity, like many Episcopal parishes, participated in the Choral Revival in the Anglican church, with its emphasis on vested choirs of men and boys trained by professional church musicians, and singing quality church music. In 1875, Trinity founded the St. Paul’s Society for students at Princeton University, where the number of Episcopalians had grown. Now called the Episcopal Church at Princeton University, it is supported by the William Alexander Procter Foundation.
Through the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s, Trinity grew slowly but during the baby boom of the late 1940s and the 1950s, the church experienced explosive growth in young families with children, with a burgeoning Sunday School, at one point claiming 500 members. Through that period the parish ministry remained essentially traditional, with outreach a minor component and the rector and assisting clergy very much in charge. During the 1950s, a large parish hall, Pierce Hall, as well as a kitchen and meeting room were built to accommodate the growing demands for space.
With the 1960s, Trinity began to shed their cultural and religious hegemony. A basement coffee house, “The Catacombs,” was opened and Trinity conducted some folk masses.
The 1960s also witnessed a devastating fire in 1963 and reconstruction in the church proper, as well as the beginning of two enduring outreach efforts: Trinity Counseling Service and All Saints’ Church, which was created in 1960 as a neighborhood church to serve the fast-growing eastern end of Princeton Township with its own vicar. It soon became independent.
The two parishes share Trinity-All Saints’ Cemetery, next to All Saints’, and some other undeveloped property at the site of All Saints’. All Saints’ was the brainchild of The Rev. Dr. John Vernon Butler, Rector from 1948 to 1959.
Next, The Rev. Robert Spears saw Trinity through the fire and rebuilding of the mid-1960s, and after seven years’ tenure became bishop of Rochester, N.Y. The Rev. James Whittemore served from 1967 to 1977, during which Trinity evolved into something like its modern form, with expanded lay leadership, liturgical renewal, a revised church, enlarged facilities, and a more diverse congregation.
A long-awaited moment came in 1977 when parishioner and clergy staff member The Rev. Daphne Hawkes — who remains a volunteer associate clergy — was ordained to the priesthood at Trinity, the first woman priest in the Diocese of New Jersey.
The Rev. John Crocker, Jr. came to Trinity in 1977 from the Episcopal chaplaincy at MIT and served until his retirement in 1989. His tenure included expanded outreach, consolidation of the many liturgical changes of the preceding years, and planning for needed facility improvements.
In 1991, after an extended interim period, The Venerable Leslie Smith, archdeacon of the neighboring Diocese of Newark, became Trinity’s most recent rector, serving until his retirement in mid-2006. His tenure was marked by the “21st Century Plan,” which included major fundraising, construction and renovation as well as outreach to temporarily homeless families.
For more information, go to www.trinityprinceton.org.
