Boston

Trinity Church

Trinity Church at north east corner of Copley Square, a cultural treasure bounded on the south west by the Boston Public Library. Trinity was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, and is the classic example of French Romanesque architecture in the United States; a style known now as Richardson Romanesque. It was built between 1873 and 1877. The Episcopalian minister in charge was The Reverend Phillips Brooks, Rector of Trinity from July 1869. The construction of this church reflected the shift by Boston's upper class away from the socially progressive, and prior to the Civil War aggressively abolitionist, Unitarian and Congregational Protestant denominations. Better to be in a conservative anglican church with the English Crown at its head, than in the same institution with Transcendentalists who read Emerson and Thoreau, or worse yet, female suffragettes.

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