With considerable fanfare and much speechmaking, the City of New York erected the first steel beam of the new Freedom Tower at Ground Zero a few weeks ago. The beam is 33 feet long, and its end is embedded in a massive concrete foundation underground. Eventually, the Freedom Tower will rise to 1,776 feet. It will be the tallest building in the world when completed, although an even taller building is expected to be built in Dubai some years thereafter.

One of the most interesting things about this first steel beam is that it was signed by many, many people who will contribute to the rebuilding of this structure. And it put me in mind of a much smaller beam, made of wood, not steel, that presently resides in a small attic room over the Narthex of the Sag Harbor Presbyterian Church. That beam, too, bears the names of important people involved in the construction of a huge tower. Their names are carved in that beam. And though it is much smaller than the beam at the Freedom Tower, in many ways the two have much in common. Both were involved in a great disaster during which buildings, on their respective sites, were destroyed and many people died. Both were involved with buildings that reached to the skies and were the wonder of the age. And both are today part of a rebuilding process, in each case, a rebuilding process has been going on for five years and will likely go on for another five before completion.

The Sag Harbor Whaler’s Church, as it was originally called, was conceived in the year 1836 by the wealthy Presbyterian congregants of that town.

Sag Harbor, at that time, as a town, was only about ninety years old, having been founded a hundred years after the original colonial New England towns of East and Southampton. From its modest beginnings, however, it prospered as none of the others had, becoming one of this country’s largest whaling ports. There was a customs house, a series of large mansions built by whaling ship captains and owners, and a main street bustling with the activities of more than three thousand people. At the bottom of the hill, at the shore in 1836, there was Long Wharf where more than 100 oceangoing whaling ships bobbed in their berths.

The Old Whaler’s Church would be at the other end of town, at the top of the hill, and would be the tallest structure on Long Island. To achieve that, the merchants hired one of the greatest American architects of the day, Minard Lafever. He did not disappoint. He came out and examined the site, and then six months later, presented the congregants with a remarkable set of plans. The Lord had been good to the people of Sag Harbor. The church, designed out of wood in an Egyptian Revival style, would rise from base to steeple tip over 140 feet. As it was atop a 50 foot hill, it would be nearly 200 feet high, a rival for any building in Manhattan, and visible from the horizon in almost every direction. It would be a building worthy of the growing port city of Sag Harbor. It would be a wonder of the age.

The church was completed and dedicated in 1844. No one knew it at the time, but the collapse of the whaling business around the world was just five years away. In 1849, almost every Sag Harbor whaling ship pulled anchor and headed around Cape Horn to join the gold rush in San Francisco. The great whaling boom in Sag Harbor was at a sudden and utter end.

The Old Whaler’s Church thrived in spite of these events. The first sixty feet of the church was a platform atop which stood this magnificent, slender, almost impossibly tall 85-foot steeple, framed with six beams upon which were carved the names of all the wealthy whaling ship captains that had contributed to its construction. A clockmaker named Ephraim Byram built a six-foot diameter brass clock for the tower. In an archway halfway up, a bell tower was created and in it a seven foot tall bell. A weather vane with a silhouette of a whale was at the very top. No one knew the seeds of that steeple’s destruction were being foretold in that weather vane.

For fifty years, this magnificent church and steeple stood atop the hill, the subject of many paintings and lithographs. Beginning around 1865 there is a record of photographs being taken of the church. In fact, there are some wonderful black and white glass plate photographs of the church in our local museums and libraries. It is fair to say that what the Lighthouse means for Montauk and what St. Patrick’s Cathedral means for Manhattan, the Old Whaler’s Church meant for Sag Harbor. A climb to the top, up a narrow wooden spiral staircase, was surely one of the great experiences of that era.

About 1870, Ephraim Byram’s brass clock was removed from the tower. It was found that the tower swayed a bit in high winds, and the swaying caused the clock to fail to keep the proper time. The clock was taken down and brought by horse and wagon to East Hampton where it was installed on the steeple of the much smaller East Hampton Presbyterian Church. It is there today.

A few years later, it was found that the steeple was leaning a few inches. A fundraiser was held and the money raised to straighten and strengthen it. The job was done in 1910.

But then, in September 1938, the great Hurricane of ‘38 roared through. The eye of this hurricane passed over Westhampton Beach, and it came through at an astonishing 65 miles an hour. At its worst, the winds were only 80 miles per hour inside the hurricane. But because hurricanes turn counter-clockwise, the real damage occurred over Westhampton Beach, Southampton and Sag Harbor. The wind of the storm, combined with the forward speed of it, created a Sunday punch of almost 150 miles an hour in that community. More than 700 people died. Nearly 9,000 homes were destroyed. Hundreds of cars were picked up and piled in heaps, downtown Westhampton Beach was flooded in eight feet of water, and tens of thousands of trees were torn out.

Around eleven in the morning, at the height of the storm, residents of that town watched as the steeple atop the Old Whaler’s Church was silently lifted straight up off its rooftop platform and set back down in a field not far away, where it fell into pieces. But among the things that were salvaged were the old brass bell and some of the great wooden carved beams.

This steeple has never been rebuilt. But then, in 2001, almost seventy-five years after it was destroyed, the church fathers of this church, which is now named the First Presbyterian Church of Sag Harbor, have announced that restoration of the steeple would be getting underway.

There would in fact be a complete renovation of the church, a structure now on the New York State Historic Register. It would begin in the basement, and would slowly proceed up toward the rebuilding of the steeple. It would be nice to build the steeple first, but as David H. Cory a member of the restoration committee says, you can’t put a new steeple on an old dilapidated building. The church would be rebuilt from the ground up.

And so it has. In the first phase, which ran from 2001 to 2006, $1.5 million was raised, mostly from private donors, and it was used to restore the outside of the building, the basement and much of the first floor. Now the church has announced the second and last phase of the project. Another $1.5 million has begun to be raised, and as it comes in, the remainder of the first floor and the second floor will be renovated, and the steeple replaced.

The steeple is, of course, the most delicate and difficult part of the project. The architect in charge, Randy Croxton, will build it on the outside exactly like the original. But inside, a support system of new steel beams will be erected, extending through the platform on the roof of the present structure, through the Narthex and into the foundations of the structure. No winds, ever again, will lift off this steeple and take it for a ride across the lawn.

As for the wooden beams saved in the attic above the Narthex, they will be in a prominent place in the reconstruction, visible from the inside, along the sides of the reconstruction of the exact same spiral staircase that was built in 1840.

Thus, about 2010, just about when the Freedom Tower is dedicated as a replacement for the World Trade Center, so will the First Presbyterian Church be dedicated as a renovation of the Old Whaler’s Church.

If you are interested in helping with this very special project, you can make a donation to the church fund by calling 631-725-0894.

The Triumph