St. Anne Church is a historic church at 58 Church Street in

Berlin, New Hampshire Berlin ( ) is a city along the Androscoggin River in Coös County, New Hampshire, Coös County in northern New Hampshire, United States. It is the northernmost city in New Hampshire and the only city in Coös County. The population was 9,425 at ...

, United States. It is the church for Good Shepherd Parish within the

Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester The Diocese of Manchester () is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory, or diocese, of the Catholic Church The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, l ...

. St. Anne Parish was founded in 1867, and was Berlin's first Roman Catholic congregation. It was merged with Guardian Angel Parish, St. Joseph Parish, and St. Kieran Parish in 2000 to form Good Shepherd Parish. Its building, constructed in 1900, is an important local example of

Romanesque architecture Romanesque architecture is an architectural style of medieval Europe that was predominant in the 11th and 12th centuries. The style eventually developed into the Gothic style with the shape of the arches providing a simple distinction: the Ro ...

, and was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

in 1979.

Architecture and history

St. Anne's stands north of Berlin's central business district at the northeast corner of Pleasant and Church streets. It is a roughly rectangular red brick structure, with a long gabled roof and towers flanking the south-facing front facade. The towers are identical in their lower levels, with tall round-arch windows at the lower level and smaller round-arch windows at a higher level. Their corners have brick quoining, and rise to a corbelled brick cornice, above which the treatments differ. The left tower has an open square belfry with round-arch openings, and is topped by a steeple; the right tower is topped by a truncated steeple topped by a statue of

Saint Anne According to apocrypha, as well as Christianity, Christian and Islamic tradition, Saint Anne was the mother of Mary, mother of Jesus, Mary, the wife of Joachim and the maternal grandmother of Jesus. Mary's mother is not named in the Bible's Gosp ...

. The interior of the building is richly decorated with carved wood and plaster ornamentation. St. Anne's was established in 1867, and was the first Roman Catholic congregation in the community. Its first church, a wood-frame structure, was built in 1882. In 1899 it was moved and adapted for use as a parish school. The present church was designed in 1900 by Archibald I. Lawrence, a local architect.''Engineering News'' 3 May 1900: 144. It was built by M. H. Roy, a contractor from

Lewiston, Maine Lewiston (; ) is the List of municipalities in Maine, second most populous city in the U.S. state of Maine, with the city's population at 37,121 as of the 2020 United States census. The city lies halfway between Augusta, Maine, Augusta, the sta ...

; the identities of the artisans who created its interior are not known. By the 1970s Berlin's Roman Catholic congregations had grown to four, with St. Anne's principally serving its French-American population. The parishes were merged in 2000.

References

External links

St. Anne Church of the Good Shepherd Parish
at ''Berlin New Hampshire History'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Saint Anne Church (Berlin, New Hampshire) Churches on the National Register of Historic Places in New Hampshire Roman Catholic churches in New Hampshire Churches in Coös County, New Hampshire Churches in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester National Register of Historic Places in Coös County, New Hampshire Churches in Berlin, New Hampshire

Architecture and history

See also

References

External links