Where is that? Jan. 27, 2024
If you know, let us know. Send your responses to [email protected] or phone 631-275-1859.
Roger McKeon is keeping his streak alive of identifying our mystery photos , emailing us the correct ID for last week’s entry (see below): “It’s the steeple of Union Chapel in the Grove.”
And Ed Hydeman and Emily Altschul-Miller were also correct in naming what author Stewart W. Herman dubbed “God’s Summer Chapel.”
The Chapel’s life, beginning in 1875 when it was built, is a connection to what was then known as the Shelter Island Heights Grove and Camp Meeting Association, established in 1872, according to Island historians Patricia and Edward Shillingburg.
Services have continued without a break since the original meetings with different speakers each Sunday during the summer. Visitors in the days before the Chapel was built would come in the summer months to the Prospect House Hotel in the Heights or small cottages nearby and gather on Sundays in “The Grove,” a natural amphitheater behind where the chapel now stands.
According to Mr. Herman, “Many families amiably paid a modest ground rent, pitched their tents among the trees and took their meals at the new restaurant pavilion which, with the passage of time, became the Chequit Inn.”
The year the chapel was built there were two special trains leaving Brooklyn — $2 a ticket — and two steamers departed on alternate dates for the overnight trip from New York.
There were also boats leaving New Haven bound for the Island, carrying New Englanders on vacation, to hear the gospel preached and also to learn about the social and moral issues of the day, including the historic 19th- and early 20th-century movements that changed America, including the abolition of slavery and securing voting rights for women.
