PARK RIDGE—During one of your visits to the Pascack Historical Society’s museum in Park Ridge, you might have heard one of their volunteers refer to the building as their biggest artifact.
There is good reason for that. The building, a former church that turns 150 years old this week, is intertwined with religious, educational, and social history of the 19th century Pascack Valley.
The region’s early settlers were principally of Dutch descent, and so the first church in the area was the Reformed Church that is still standing at 65 Pascack Road. Built in 1812, that was the only church in the local area for most of the 19th century. When the chapel at 19 Ridge Ave. opened in 1873, it offered an alternative to the Dutch Reformed way of worshipping.
The building saw many Park Ridge “firsts”: it had the first lending library in town, the first soup kitchen for the hungry, and the first homeless shelter. The chapel was the town’s first public meeting space and for years school graduations were held within its walls. Its bell did double duty as the first fire alarm in town.
Finally, the building became the first free museum in Bergen County when the Pascack Historical Society set up its headquarters in 1952.
The congregation that established the chapel had its origins in the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn. This was during the ministry of the famous preacher and abolitionist Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.
James Leach (1827–1906), a parishioner of Beecher’s at Plymouth Church and a wealthy New York stationery supplier, moved his family to Park Ridge in 1872. The railroad had just come through the Pascack Valley a couple of years earlier, enabling residents for the first time to live in the country while commuting into New York City for work. The beautiful Leach mansion, known as Glen Manor, sat on a 100 acre estate on Fremont Avenue.
Leach became a leader in the community. He was a member of the first borough council when Park Ridge was incorporated in 1894, and he was the mayor at the time of his death in 1906. He was also concerned with the education of children. Leach had 16 offspring from several marriages across his lifetime. He served on the local school board and donated land at Pascack Road and Park Avenue for the building of a school, which is still the location of Park Ridge High School.
Leach sought to establish in Park Ridge a program similar to Plymouth’s Sunday School, where he had served as assistant superintendent. To this end, he collaborated with father–son pair James B. Hall and Jacob H. Hall to purchase land and build a Sunday school/meeting hall on a newly mapped street called Ridge Avenue.
By the 1870s, a few members of the Dutch Reformed Church on Pascack Road had differences with the parish and broke their ties with its tradition. James B. Hall (b. 1803), a farmer and itinerant shoemaker, and his son, Jacob H. Hall (b. 1845), a merchant and real estate agent, were two dissenters. Like Leach, these men were of British descent rather than being Jersey Dutch like most of their neighbors.
Both were also highly involved in community affairs in Park Ridge. Like Leach, Jacob Hall was a member of the first borough council.
Construction on the new chapel began in the summer of 1873. The whole project, including the land, cost $1,000—a sum equivalent to about $25,000 in today’s money. There is no record of construction work or the builders, although they were no doubt from local families and experienced craftsmen. Over the course of several months a chapel took shape, a lone structure in a vast field that would one day be a fully developed residential street.
Dedication day was Dec. 8, 1873. The keynote speaker on that Monday morning was Henry Ward Beecher, the most renowned preacher in America.
From the beginning of his pastoral career, Beecher used his pulpit and pen to preach about social issues. He advocated for women’s rights, including education and the right to vote, and was a vehement abolitionist. He captivated audiences and was known for his “Beecherisms”—witty and insightful quotations—that peppered his work.
The Beecher family was teeming with intelligent, educated, and determined people, all fighting for social change in their own way. The most famous of these was Henry Ward Beecher’s sister, author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote the novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Beecher and his Plymouth Church provided gifts to the new chapel at Park Ridge, including a cottage organ, which is in the museum’s Victorian parlor, and the church bell, which would later double as Park Ridge’s first fire alarm.
To this day there is a small hole in the side of the museum’s entryway, and this contains a brass sleeve through which one of the bell ropes passes to the outside of the building. Long ago, this hole was created so that the alarm could be sounded even if the church was locked.
It was in the Congregational Church that the community’s first lending library was started. A large, multi-doored wooden bookcase (which is in the museum’s Ellen Berdais Lecture Hall) held a collection of almost 200 donated books. This library was open to all members of the Sunday school and became an incentive to attend. In this era long before 20th century diversions like movies, television, and radio, the region’s young people heartily seized this opportunity to borrow and read all sorts of books.
Such a library was unheard of in a church at the time, and, in fact, it was controversial. Some of Pascack’s old-time Jersey Dutch regarded the library as a public menace for its “deleterious influence” on young minds. When a brutal murder took place in Park Ridge during a store robbery in December 1884, a local preacher, in denouncing the act from his pulpit, attributed the depravity to books. The preacher said the murderer’s mind had no doubt been warped by the novels he read in boyhood—the same sort of tales available at the chapel library!
The lending library was not the only practice that riled traditionalists. The first secular observance of Christmas took place at the Congregational chapel, inspiring outrage from many who believed that a Christmas tree and the appearance of a real live Santa Claus were akin to paganism.
Then there were the spring and fall celebrations, when the congregants had the nerve to conduct a festive meal right inside a house of worship.
Finally, the music: the organ playing and hymns at this little chapel were so rousing and upbeat that they bordered on blasphemy.
When the Van Riper bobbin factory near Mill Pond burned in the 1870s, its employees were left destitute and slum conditions prevailed in the nearby shacks on Mill Road. While others in the community viewed their down-and-out neighbors with derision, the people of the congregational church stepped in, providing food, clothing, and odd jobs, hosting sewing circles to make garments for the children, and offering housekeeping classes to promote sanitary living conditions.
By the 1940s the Park Ridge congregation had grown too large for the building, counting over 300 members from its original dozen 80 years earlier. The chapel’s location, nestled between residential homes on Ridge Avenue, limited expansion.
The church purchased land on Pascack Road opposite Ridge Avenue, and an original plan in the late 1940s called for the chapel to be picked up off its foundation and moved to the new site 1,000 feet down the hill, where it would form the nucleus of an expanded church campus.
However, there were logistical problems in moving the building. They had to leave their beloved 1873 chapel behind and start building from the ground up at the Pascack Road site. The church is still going strong there today.
The congregation put its former home up for sale, thus creating a perfect opportunity for the Pascack Historical Society, which had incorporated some 10 years earlier and was in need of a suitable space to exhibit a growing collection of artifacts.
Through diligent fundraising, PHS members bought the property for $5,500 and opened Bergen County’s first free-admission museum, Nov. 1, 1952.
The Pascack Historical Society remains a place where all are welcome to visit and learn about the rich heritage that makes our Pascack Valley so special.
Visit the museum on a Sunday afternoon from 1 to 4 p.m. Admission is always free, and parents and grandparents are encouraged to bring children.
In addition to thousands of artifacts that showcase Pascack Valley life as it was in previous centuries, there is a special display full of items from the early days of the Congregational church.
For more information, call (201) 573-0307, email info@pascackhistoricalsociety.org, and find the Pascack Historical Society on Facebook. Read this story in the Dec. 4, 2023 issue on free PDF.
Kristin Beuscher is president of Pascack Historical Society