St. John's Episcopal Church of East Hartford

St. John's Episcopal Church, East Hartford (circa 1867) is one of the few High Victorian Gothic style churches in Connecticut, designed by Edward Potter. Though the congregation recently merged with St. John's Episcopal Church in Vernon, the chapel and church operated in the community for more than a century. Reverend John James McCook, who briefly served in the Civil War, and dabbled in both medicine and law, led the church for its first sixty-two years. 

Students from Trinity College, an Episcopal institution, briefly conducted an Episcopal mission in 1842 and again in 1852 by reaching English immigrants working in New England mills. The English arriving in Connecticut gravitated to the Episcopal church because it enjoyed similarities to the Church of England. Two years later, the group established Grace Church, holding services in several buildings for nearly a dozen years. In 1865, the building name changed to St. John's Chapel and, three years later, in 1868, the establishment of the St. John's Church commenced. 

John James McCook (1843 - 1927), a Trinity graduate, became ordained in 1866 and subsequently led the parish for sixty-one years, without pay. McCook, a third-generation Irish-American, served three months as a chaplain in the Union Army during the Civil War and was part of an Ohio family that contributed fifteen members to the Union Army, known as the "Fighting McCooks." A few months after serving the army, he left and entered Trinity College in 1861. After graduation, he moved several times for a period of five years. McCook briefly studied medicine at Columbia University before transferring to Berkeley Divinity School in Middletown, Connecticut. He served as the St. John's (East Hartford) rector for a year before taking the same position for the St. John's in Detroit for a short time before returning to East Hartford. Finally, in 1866, he was ordained and became rector of St. John's in East Hartford.  

Shortly after becoming ordained, McCook married Eliza Sheldon Butler, who came from a wealthy Hartford family. The couple lived in a home on Main Street in Hartford, a historical landmark now known as the Butler-McCook House. In 1882, Trinity College hired McCook as part of its faculty. He taught languages at the college until he retired in 1923 and transitioned to a role on the Trinity College Board of Trustees. Meanwhile, his published works describe the attention he gave as a church leader to poverty, vagrancy, alcohol, and other related problems he witnessed in his many travels during the 1860s. 

Shortly after McCook was ordained, construction began on the historic chapel occurred, which opened in 1867. The chapel architect, Edward Tuckerman Potter (1831-1904), studied under Richard UpJohn, a prolific church architect that embraced the Gothic Revival style. Potter melded the lessons provided by UpJohn with architect John Ruskin's writings, a champion of northern Italian architecture, to develop what came to be known as the High Victorian Gothic style.

Historical Society of East Hartford. http://www.hseh.org/Research.htm

Ransom, David F. "Nomination Form: St. John's Episcopal Church." National Register of Historic Places. nps.gov. November 28, 1983. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/83003567_text. 

Whalen, Charles, and Barbara Whalen. The Fighting McCooks: America's Famous Fighting Family. Bethesda, MD: Westmoreland Press, 2006.