history

At the time of this earliest known image of the Tyringham Church, a stereopticon photo, the landmark had been standing prominently on an eminence on the south side of the village for some 30 years.

The church was built at a cost of $6,000 by the Methodists in 1844.

This was the peak era of Tyringham’s prosperity as a farming, paper and rake-making community. It was also a time of religious revival. Local Baptists constructed a church in the village the same year as the Methodists. During the 1840s Tyringham also had a thriving Shaker community on Fernside.

Today only the old Methodist church, now known as the Union Church, survives in town.

In southern Berkshire County there are a number of surviving Greek Revival churches of the same vintage – New Marlborough (1838), West Stockbridge (1839), Ashley Falls (1844), Monterey (1848). Their interiors, with grand entablatures behind the pulpit, are similar to Tyringham’s. The exteriors, however, are more austere and their belfries restrained.

The design of Tyringham’s Methodist Church - with its heroic fluted Ionic columns and two-tiered decorated square tower - springs from northwestern Connecticut. Two Congregational churches in Colebrook CT (1842) and Barkhamsted Center CT (1844-5) have similar porticos and square towers. Tyringham’s exuberant fan-shaped tower ornaments are unique.

Contemporary sources list the builders of the Tyringham Church as Porter, Carter and Crittenden. Crittenden was a leading Methodist who had moved to Tyringham in the 1830s from Wethersfield, CT. It seems likely he brought to town the two Connecticut builders, Porter and Carter.

This 1898 Valley Gleaner photo shows the fifty-year-old church still in an open landscape with its parsonage beside it. The only surviving historic interior photo shows the church swathed in flags and flowers for Old Home Week in 1905. This was still an era of horse drawn transportation as shown in another 1905 photo of an elderly resident, Wallace Garfield, on the Main Road below the Church property. Horse sheds used to stand behind the church.

Big changes came by the 1920s when the church was adapting to automobiles and allowing parking on the front lawn in the shade of the growing maple trees. By then the Baptist and Methodist Congregations had merged in a seven-year effort consummated in 1919 under a Congregational minister, Rev Harold Gould. The Baptist Church building in the village was eventually dismantled in the late 1930s.

The photo of the “Easter Snowstorm of 1956” dates from an era of Rev. Franklin Couch. Under “Cap” Couch’s leadership, the downstairs community spaces were improved with the introduction of running water making possible a kitchen and restrooms. Little has changed in this community space since his day, including two projecting covered basement entries on the south and north facades.

The church was affiliated with the United Church of Christ until the 1980s when it became an independent self-governing body – truly a Union Church. Rev Janet McKinstry began her ministry in Tyringham as a second-year theological student in 2002. She was ordained in the UCC church in 2005 and has served in Tyringham ever since.