More on the Chestnut Ridge Methodist Church

I found an article written by Richard N. Lander on the Chestnut Methodist Church in The Westchester Historian Vol. 51, No. 1 (Winter 1975). This photograph of the church and its stables, taken about 1900, appeared on the cover of that issue. 

Mr. Lander provides many new (to me anyway) details about the church, including:

• The Chestnut Ridge Methodist Society was never officially organized or incorporated
• Richard Mosher, a schoolteacher and farmer, was the donor of the land
• Local tradition held that the congregation built the church itself, with no professional assistance
• "The building was a plain clapboard structure with three large windows on either side, these windows were of clear glass with accompanying shutters. Across the front of the church was a porch supported by four pillars and a small enclosed entryway located between the center pillars. Inside was one large assembly room which would accommodate forty to fifty persons. The pulpit was at the west end of the room on a raised platform one step above the floor, enclosed by a communion rail with kneeling cushions in front of the rail. The room was heated by a coal stove. No tower or steeple adorned the building."
• The church was under the charge of the Bedford Methodist Church until 1888
• From 1889 to 1895, it was under the charge of the Mount Kisco Methodist Church
• No one remembered when regular services stopped
• Arthur W. Butler, who bought the land surrounding the church (along with much of Chestnut Ridge), used the church as a storehouse for farm tools before he demolished it
• The Mount Kisco Methodist Church owns the photograph featured on the cover
• On December 1, 1963, the author took Mrs. Olive Cunningham Heuss, who was then in her 80s and remembered attending the Chestnut Ridge Church as a child, to look for remains of the building. They found only "a scattering of foundation stones."