Located at 239 Harvard Street in The Port neighborhood, the St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church (originally the Harvard Street Methodist Episcopal Church) has stood since before the American Civil War and has been a neighborhood landmark ever since.
Its story began when group of Methodists first congregated in 1835 with the hopes of gathering funds for their own place of worship. In 1843, a wooden structure was dedicated on the present site. The building was enlarged in 1851, only to be destroyed by fire in 1857. A second church was then built by Boston architect Harvey Graves. Suffering the same fate as the first, the wooden church burned to the ground three years later. Undeterred and learning their lesson, the church then hired Graves again to design a “fire-proof brick structure”. The cornerstone was laid in 1861 and the building was dedicated in 1862, this was the last church built in Cambridge before the Civil War.
The handsome brick church was built with the symmetrical, volumetric treatment of a Greek temple with the architectural details of Romanesque and Gothic treatments. The front walls project outward at the middle to form an entrance tower, which is divided by brick string courses into a deeply recessed entrance. Above, the church had a massive bell-tower with large clocks on all four sides. The tower was capped with a tasteful dome standing approximately 130 feet above the street.
By 1910, the tower was turning heads not for its beauty, but as it would sway back and forth with the wind, all above nearby playgrounds and pedestrians below. In 1914, the trustees of the church decided that the best thing to do would be to take the steeple down. The removal of the steeple necessitated the removal of the old clock, that for so many years kept the people in that section of the city posted on the time of day, as it was the only public clock within sight of homes in that vicinity. The tower that for just over 50 years and had rung out notes of joy on holidays such as Christmas and the Fourth of July and on other days, slow and solemn tones as with the death of Lincoln, was demolished.
In 1941, the Harvard Street Methodist Church merged with Epworth Methodist, forming the Harvard-Epworth Methodist Church, which is located at 1555 Mass. Ave. That same year, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, formerly located at 211 Columbia Street, moved in. According to the “Historical Sketch of St. Bartholomew’s Protestant Episcopal Church of Cambridge”, prepared for the WPA Survey of State and Local Historical Records in 1936.
[The Church] “organized by the St. Andrew’s Association, an original group of seventeen Negroes who resented the segregation of Negro children in the Sunday School classes at St. Peter’s Church. Under the leadership of Mr. John S. Brown, the association held weekly meetings in the homes of various members for three months prior to the organization of the church. After the matter of segregation had been brought to the attention of Bishop Lawrence (William), who did not favor a separate church for negroes, he suggested that Mr. Brown and his people share worship with a small congregation of white people who were then worshipping at St. Bartholomew’s on Columbia Street. A group of forty negro worshippers marched into the church one Sunday morning, coming back every week with more and more members. The Bishop then advised turning the church over to the negro congregation with a white rector as a pastor. The members informed the Bishop that they desired a leader of their own race to represent them. In 1908, Rev. George Alexander McGuire, a native of Antigua, became the first settled pastor of the congregation”.
The church is still home to St. Bartholomew’s and it is an active congregation.
Sources:
Cambridge Chronicle Archives.
Historical Sketch of St. Bartholomew’s Protestant Episcopal Church of Cambridge
Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge, Volume 3: Cambridgeport, 1971.
