Samiksha Jaiswal (Editor)

Cousins Island Chapel

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Built
  
1894

Opened
  
1894

Added to NRHP
  
20 June 1997

NRHP Reference #
  
97000605

Area
  
3,642 m²

Cousins Island Chapel

Location
  
E side of Cousins Rd., 1.9 mi. SE of jct. with Morton Rd., Cousins Island, Maine

Address
  
Cousins St, Yarmouth, ME 04096, USA

Architectural styles
  
Shingle style architecture, Gothic architecture

Similar
  
White Pine Community Church, Community Services, Camp Soci, Royal River Park, Pratt's Brook Park

Cousins Island Chapel is an historic non-denominational chapel on Cousins Road on Cousins Island, an island Casco Bay off the coast of Yarmouth, Maine. Built in 1894 by local year-round residents, it is the most architecturally notable building on the island, and is representative of a late 19th-century trend of building summer chapels in coastal Maine. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.

Description and history

Cousins Island is a roughly oblong island located just off the coast of Yarmouth, Maine, to which municipality it belongs. It is joined to the mainland by a causeway, and is connected via a second causeway to the small Littlejohn Island to its east. The Cousins Island Chapel is located near the center of Cousins Island, on the east side of the main road (Cousins Road), just north of its junction with the road leading to Littlejohn Island. The chapel is a modest single-story wood frame structure, with a steeply pitched gable roof, and an exterior finished in a combination of wooden shingles and board-and-batten siding. It is oriented with its long axis parallel to the road, with a band of sash windows offset to the left of center on the street-facing facade, and a hip-roofed entrance porch to the right. The gable ends have lancet-arched windows, some with stained glass, with board-and-batten siding in the gables. There are decorative sawn brackets at the lower edge of the roof where it flare out slightly.

The chapel was built in 1894-95 by volunteer labor organized by the Yarmouth First Baptist Church, to provide a place of worship for the residents of Cousins and Littlejohn Islands. Although most of the services held there were Baptist, the building was open to all denominations. It was used regularly for services until World War II, and is now maintained by a local nonprofit group that organizes periodic summer services. The chapel is one of a series of architecturally distinctive coastal chapels built in Maine during the late 19th century, although it is distinguished from the others in that it was built for year-round residents, rather than for summer visitors.

References

Cousins Island Chapel Wikipedia