The St. Thomas congregation was incorporated May 4, 1892.Work on the building began on August 22, 1893.The first worship in the building was onFebruary 25, 1894.
The church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. It is located about eight miles east of Ithaca on Rt. 79. The building is a diminutive rural example of the High Victorian Gothic style executed in wood. The main body of the church is a regular rectangle dominated by a steeply pitched gable roof and featuring a square steeple and open belfry.
The Building
The cornerstone was laid on August 22, 1893, barely fifteen months after the parish was organized. The following winter appears to have been a mild one, because St. Thomas was ready to house its first service on February 25, 1894.
The church building is a combination of Queen Anne and Stick styles of architecture, with some Gothic touches. The former St. Stephen’s Church in Romulus, New York, appears to have been built from the same plans, although it has less ornamental detail. The architect for both was probably a Mr. Haight, of Ovid, New YorkY.
Virtually all of the furnishings are original. In the early 1970s the altar area furniture was shifted to increase space, and pews in the front portion of the nave turned 90 to provide a more intimate setting for worship. St. Thomas remains the least-altered Victorian village church in the area.
The stained glass windows are original, and have been restored by the Jerome Durr Studio. In 2012, Mr. Durr created the stained glass pane above the Narthex entrance which honors long time rector, Father Cullie Mowers.
In 1991, preparing for the congregation s Centennial, all of the movable furnishings were stored and services relocated to the nearby Ellis Hollow Community Church for three months while the interior was extensively repaired and repainted in its 1893 colors. The floors and woodwork were cleaned and resealed by hand to preserve their original appearance, and new seat cushions and carpet runners were provided. The building was listed on the New York State and National Registers of Historic Places in 1993 and 1994, respectively. In 1998 the exterior was renovated and repainted in a color scheme derived from traces of the original paint discovered during carpentry repairs; the parish received a citation for this work from Historic Ithaca & Tompkins County.
The ceramic Stations of the Cross, by Dirk Slabbinck of Belgium, were installed in 2005.
The Bell
When the church was built, the bell tower was unoccupied, and remained so until 1957, when structural problems at the nearby Methodist Church, which stood where the gas station and convenience store are now, required their bell to be removed. The Methodist congregation generously donated it to St. Thomas’ and despite significant engineering problems it was installed there. Less than a year later, the Methodist building burned to the ground. The bell is 27” tall and 37” in diameter at the mouth, and is said to weigh about 1,000 pounds. It was cast by Meneely & Company of West Troy, NY, in 1885, and bears the following inscription:
The Organ
Between 1894 and 1977, instrumental music at St. Thomas’s was provided by reed (“pump”) organs, the last of which was a large one-manual Kimball instrument.
In 1977 Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Franklin, VA, offered St. Thomas’ their historic organ, which was being replaced by a new pipe organ, if the parish would restore and use it. The disassembled organ arrived in March and was stored in an unused church nearby. It was partially set up by the end of the year, and heard on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered on Christmas Eve.
A large portion of the tedious restoration work was done by members of the parish under professional guidance. The organ was apparently built before the Civil War by a German craftsman in the Philadelphia area, rebuilt in 1898 by Adam Stein of Baltimore for the Franklin church, and moved to their present building in 1914. Tonal changes made during the restoration returned the instrument to an approximation of its pre-1898 state; minor additional improvements have been made since then.
There are 414 pipes, arranged in nine ranks (sets), seven played from the manual keyboard, and two from the pedalboard. The mechanism is entirely tracker (mechanical) action; the only electrical component is the blower, added in 1914. The pedalboard was enlarged from 13 to 17 notes and the blower replaced in 2006. The Fifteenth, the wooden pipes of the Pedal stops and the Flute, and the smaller pipes in the facade are original; the Dulciana, Octave and most of the Open Diapason date from 1898; the Twelfth was created in 1977 from pipes of the 1898 Salicional; the Melodia is from an 1872 organ by Steer & Turner; the metal pipes of the Flute and the eight pipes added to the Pedal in 2006 are old, but not original.
The completed organ was dedicated on April 1, 1979.
The Congregation
The first record of Episcopal worship in the northern part of the Town of Caroline is from 1878, when services were conducted by “the Rev. Mr. Hawkins, of Ithaca” at the former Dutch Reformed Church, which stood across the road from the present Caroline School. On occasion, the Ithaca parish’s choir would join in the services.
By 1890, a congregation was worshipping regularly in the Slaterville Springs schoolhouse (now the Town Hall), with the Rev. Dr. Moses Coit Tyler as pastor. Tyler was a Congregational minister serving a church in Owego when he was called in 1881 to be Cornell’s first appointed Professor of American History. From 1890 until 1894 sacramental ministry was provided by the Rev. Charles W. McNish, a noted Episcopal missionary priest in the eastern Finger Lakes area. On May 4, 1892 a meeting to organize the parish was held at the school house. The first wardens were Robert G. H. Speed and James W. Reed. Vestry members were Moses Bull, John Bull, J. D. Schutt, Omar D. Mulks, Charles J. Northrup and William W. White.
From the beginning, St. Thomas’ was served by clergy and lay readers who also had other responsibilities. Most often these included St. John’s, Speedsville. or St. Mark’s, Candor, or both—difficult in those days of horse-powered travel, although Candor was reachable by train from Besemer. This sharing of ministers was to continue in various patterns until 1980.
Except for brief interruptions during the Depression and the 1940s, worship has been offered consistently at St. Thomas’ from 1890 to the present day. The congregation has changed from a village parish largely serving families within walking distance, to a more diverse community whose members come from a much wider area.
Although always a small parish, rarely counting more than thirty households in its membership, it has operated without outside aid since 1980, and is grateful to be able to support needs both local and farther afield with tithes of parish income, and aid to disaster victims at a level which would not be expected from the number of members. From July of 2003 to July 2014 St. Thomas’ administered and largely staffed the Caroline Food Pantry, distributing groceries to hundreds of Town residents twice every month. St. Thomas continues to support the food pantry with volunteer help.