Old St. Mark's Church - Found?

 

For a while now, Laurie and I have been investigating the fate of Old St. Mark's Church after the new St. Mark's was built in 1911. According to several accounts, including the Rev. H. Adye Prichard writing to Herbert B. Howe in the late 1920s, the Old St. Mark's Church building was given to the St. Francis A.M.E. Zion Church around 1916. The St. Francis congregation moved the church to a different location. Prichard wasn't sure what happened to the church after that.

Slowly, we have been putting the pieces together. Through various newspaper articles, we learned that the Old St. Mark's building was moved to Kisco Avenue, where they used it for ten years before building another church on Maple Avenue. Laurie located this church in an atlas of 1929-31. Apparently, some of the beams from the Old St. Mark's building were used in constructing this church.


In the 1960s, the Presbyterian Church decided to move to a different location and gave their church to the St. Francis A.M.E. Zion Church, which still uses it today. But what became of the old church on Maple Avenue, with the beams from Old St. Mark's? We weren't sure until we found this photograph below, showing the St. Francis A.M.E. Zion Church that was built in 1926.

We had never seen an image of this building before. Now, knowing its exact location, we went to see what was there today. This is what we found:

Is it the same building? If the answer is yes, it certainly has had a lot of alterations, but that is to be expected. Notably, this building has the same profile as the building shown in the 1929-31 map. Also, looking back at the photo of the building as it appeared in 1926, I feel like I can see how they might have used parts of the Old St. Mark's in its construction. Its facade has the same basic shape. What do you think?