Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1821
Scan of drawing on front page of All Saints’ Chronicle, August, 1892, showing the proposed new All Saints Church.
209-211 Ashmont Street, The Parish of All Saints
Source: Codman Square House Tour Booklet 2001
Year Built: 1894
Architect: Ralph Adams Cram & Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue
The Codman Square House Tour is honored to present a building whose architectural significance is truly national in scale, Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue’s renowned All Saints, Ashmont. Remarkably, it was the first church that either had designed. Commissioned by members of the old Boston family for whom the adjacent Peabody Square is also named, All Saints illustrates the ardor with which some Gilded-Age Yankees embraced the Anglicanism their ancestors had rejected. The son of a Unitarian minister, Cram found in the Episcopal Church an architectural ideology that would spark a less romantic and more intellectually rigorous revival of Gothic forms.
Deploring the “aggressive picturesqueness” that to his mind trivialized the style Cram sought instead to convey by its very dignity and simplicity that this was a church of its own time. This modernity is evident in the unadorned quality of its long nave and massive tower, which forsake medieval precedent to achieve an austere majesty that is wholly new and unmistakably American.
The ascetic interior is intended as a foil to areas of concentrated magnificence at the side chapels and main chancel, which is dominated by a high altar and reredos of superbly carved French limestone. The high altar cross and candlesticks of gilded brass were designed by Goodhue. The chancel woodwork (above) depicts scenes from the Old and New Testaments. Figural stained glass windows installed periodically over many decades illustrate the evolution of the art form from the 1890s through the twentieth century.
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