10 West Lockwood Avenue (at Elm)
Webster Groves, Missouri 63119
firstchurchwg.org

When it was organized in 1866, the Congregational church in Webster Groves was the first in the newly emerging suburban community and only the second of its denomination in the state. The Congregationalists, descended from the Pilgrims and the Puritans, were based in New England and were uncompromising in their opposition to slavery, not a popular stand in pre-Civil War Missouri. Their first church in St. Louis, founded in 1853, is now on Wydown in Clayton. Webster Groves had been opened up by the construction of the Missouri Pacific Railroad that same year, but it remained un-incorporated until 1896.

The new congregation worshipped in a frame chapel until 1870, when Frederick Raeder designed a Gothic Revival stone chapel for the present site. Raeder was born in Koblenz and studied in Germany before coming to the United States in the 1850s. He arrived in St. Louis in 1867 and served as architect for the school board from 1871 to 1873. His iron-fronted Peper Tobacco factory on Laclede’s Landing is now known as Raeder Place. Matthew, Clark & James designed a larger worship space in 1893, leaving Raeder’s chapel as the west wing.

After eighty years, the stone of the 1893 church began to crumble, and the high pyramidal roof threatened to slide off. The congregation elected to replace the 1893 building with a new, larger one designed by Kurt Landberg, a specialist in church design. With his former partner, Verner Burks, Landberg had renovated Christ Church (Episcopal) Cathedral, and more recently he had redesigned the interiors of both St. Francis Xavier (College) Church and Second Presbyterian Church, where the Chamber Chorus opened this season. Here he kept the Ræder wing and the 1893 steeple but closed the original entrance. He reinstalled the 1893 glass in his new church, which he faced with a stone expected to remain more solid than the old had been. The new space was dedicated on April 10, 1994, the new organ’s inaugural recital was performed by the Chamber Chorus’s founder, Dr. Ronald Arnatt, and on May 3, 1996 Kurt Landberg’s own memorial service was conducted here. The Chamber Chorus’s only performance in the new building, on November 17, 1996, was subsequently repeated with modifications two years later at Washington University's Graham Chapel, and the repertoire recorded for the group's fifth compact disc, Rome's Golden Poets.

Notes by Esley Hamilton and Philip Barnes