preservation consultant Ned Connors. For the next
few years, Connors would guide the team through the
nomination process. It was the first NHL assignment
he had even undertaken. “They don’t come around very
often,” he explained, and for good reason – the process
requires a massive amount of research. “I felt like a
graduate student again,” Connors joked.
An NHL nomination must demonstrate a site’s national
significance. As Connors put it, “someone from
Phoenix, Arizona, needs to walk in and feel that it’s his
or her own architectural and historical patrimony.”
As one of Rhode Island’s oldest congregations, NCC’s
regional significance was already self-evident. The real
challenge was to contextualize the church’s interior
within the wider context of American religious history
and architecture. Connors’ report did so by covering
the relevant background of both the church and
LaFarge, its artistic visionary.
Traditionally, Congregationalists preferred
worship spaces that reflected a stoic and austere
religious experience. Prior to LaFarge’s work, NCC
echoed this conservative aesthetic. The church was
essentially a rectangular box derived from the New
England “meetinghouse” model. Because of the
biblical prohibition against graven images, Newport
churchgoers did not want artistic depictions of saints or
other religious images.
For this reason, LaFarge’s decorative program
represented a dramatic shift. Connors explained
that LaFarge “completely transformed this drab,
conservative building into a fantasy land,” embracing
new religious sensibilities that called for greater
flexibility and passion in worship. The younger
generation of mid-19th-century Congregationalists
wanted their space to inspire devotion, an idea quite
literally reflected by LaFarge’s use of light and bright
colors.
LaFarge’s great innovation was his use of opalescent
glass. Most church windows are simply translucent,
either letting light in directly or coloring it through
stained glass. But opalescent glass mediates the amount
of light to create unique three-dimensional effects.
In Connors’ words, it is “like the difference between a
plasma-display color TV and black and white.” Using
a process called “layering,” LaFarge laid down several
A gallery window designed by John LaFarge at Newport
Congregational Church in Newport, RI. Photo courtesy of
LaFarge Restoration Fund: Aaron Usher, photographer.
coats of glass, each of different colors and transparency.
His revolutionary work on opalescent glass (parallel
with the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany) embraced the
new techniques of modernity, departing from the older
models of stained glass based on Medieval styles.
After a presentation of Connors’ research in
Washington, DC, the church’s nomination received
unanimous approval from the National Historic
Landmarks Committee of the National Park Service.
The NCC team waited another few months for the
official confirmation from Secretary of the Interior
Ken Salazar. On October 16th, 2012, Salazar’s signature
formally established Newport Congregational Church
as a National Historic Landmark, marking another
milestone in the congregation’s journey.
Sacred Places • Fall 2013 • 18