Landscape Information
Situated in a residential neighborhood north of Wolcott Avenue, this approximately twelve-acre rectangular property is framed by streets and features a church and cemetery. Portions of the burial ground were established in the early nineteenth century and predate construction of the church and accompanying buildings. In the 1860s the parish, then called St. Anna’s, hired Frederick Clarke Withers to design a church and rectory and engaged one of their vestrymen, Henry Winthrop Sargent, to develop the landscape.
The southern portion of the property features entry drives that converge at a Gothic Revival church located near the center of the property. The church, completed in 1870, is complemented by a rectory, erected the same year, and a parish house, constructed in 1892. The drives frame a level lawn, which affords borrowed eastern views of nearby Mount Beacon and was embellished by Sargent with Picturesque tree plantings, including larch, pine, and maple. Informally staggered tree groupings extend along the entire length of Wolcott Avenue.
North of the drives and religious buildings, the property is divided into three rectangular parcels with the central section dedicated to a distinctive, rocky hillock. The relatively level eastern and western parcels contain modest burial plots marked with stone headstones or obelisks. Specimen trees, including maple and oak, are interspersed throughout, and a beech allée leads visitors from the church to the northeastern parcel. The densely canopied rocky outcrop of the central section towers over the burial plots and Union Street to the north. Portions of the stone outcrop were quarried in the late nineteenth century to provide foundation stones for the parish house. The property was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.
