Trinity Church

Trinity Church in Newport gave the Church of England a foothold in colonial Rhode Island within the city’s unusually tolerant religious climate. The parish was founded about 1698 after many colonists, driven by the excesses of Puritanism, came to Newport seeking liberty of conscience and religion alongside followers of Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, the Quakers, the Jews, and others. As the English Crown required membership in the Church of England for royal office holders, Trinity gained institutional strength, and in 1701 its request for a resident missionary minister became the first petition before the London Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. After two unsatisfactory candidates, the Society sent Reverend James Honyman, a former naval chaplain who served in Newport from 1704 until his death in 1750. The congregation’s first church was erected in 1700, but by 1724 it had been outgrown, dismantled, sold, and floated across Narragansett Bay to Warwick. A new church was then designed and built in 1724-1726 by master builder Richard Munday, whose work adapted the Anglican Baroque influence of Christopher Wren to a colonial church. By the 1750s Trinity had become the third largest congregation in Newport as wealthy and socially prominent families left the stricter Society of Friends and Baptist churches to join it, and in 1762 the building was enlarged by one-third by cutting it in half and inserting a center section. During the 19th century Trinity became the church of many Summer Colonists, and by the 1830s its size and diversity led to the growth of other Episcopal parishes, including Zion, St. George’s, Emmanuel, and St. John’s. The church was restored in 1925 by preservation architect Norman Isham, Honyman Hall was built beside it in 1956 and named for its first rector, and after serious structural problems were discovered in 1984, architects Irving Haynes and Associates stabilized the church in 1986-87 by inserting a metal frame into the existing structure.

Newport, Rhode Island · United States