Reformed Church of New Paltz

An 1860s drawing based on memories of the second stone church built in 1773.

Founded in 1683, the Reformed Church was the first place of worship established in New Paltz, New York, where French-speaking Protestants had settled in 1677. Records of the church were recorded in the French language for the first fifty years of the congregation. For about the next seventy years, the records were kept in Dutch. Finally, they were kept in English.

The first church on Huguenot Street was constructed of wood and was followed, in 1717, by the first stone church. As the congregation grew, a larger stone church was constructed in the 1770s farther north on Huguenot Street in the area adjacent to the 1839 brick church, which stands today. A replica of the first stone church was completed in 1973 on land adjacent to the church’s original location near the community’s burying ground. 

Included in the New Paltz Historic Documents project are the First and Second Church Registers, which contain baptismal and marriage records. The digital version of First Church Register, written in French, Dutch, and Latin, contains an 1846 French translation by Ewing Dubois. Historic Huguenot Street, with the support by a grant from the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, commissioned a new translation of the Second Church Register, along with other Dutch-language documents, by Dr. Jaap Jacobs and Julie van den Hout, MA (2022-23). The new translation updates and corrects the Dingman Versteeg translation published by the Holland Society of New York in 1896. The personal names in both registers are fully searchable.

Digitization of the First and Second Registers was made possible with funding from the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York (2017). Digitization of remaining records was completed with funding from a major grant to Historic Huguenot Street from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2021-24).  

The collection also contains four additional volumes of church records, account books, consistory meeting records, correspondence, and estate records, as well as records concerning the construction of the original stone church. To explore these documents, click here.