To St. Paul's Reformed church on Twenty-first Street, $15,000; $8,000 to the Prospect Hill Reformed church on Eighty-fifth Street, and about $18,000 to the Northwest Reformed church on Twenty-third Street. A $500 United States bond was given by William B. Crosby to the Sunday school of the Twenty-first Street church. The baptismal font was presented to St. Paul's church, the splendid communion service to the Prospect Hill church. All these churches have past out of existence. The organ was presented to the Church of the Sea and Land; "the property right in the Henry Rutgers tablet was given to R. R. Crosby; the McMurray tablet to Henry Rutgers McMurray. A vault in Twenty-second Street was given to the Prospect Hill church. The bell, now loaned to the Church of the Sea and Land, was given in a revisionary right to the consistory of the Collegiate church, in case it ever ceases to ring for a Protestant church." It still rings undisturbed, tho it has not in the memory of man swung on its wheel. Only recently has it been given back one of its earliest powers: it is to ring the alarum if all modern means fail. It was cast in Troy in 1847, and the committee (Crosby, Conover and Lyles) spent $365.14 for it. The congregation thought too much of it in 1848 to allow its use by Engine Company 42 for fire alarms. The books of the Market Street church were left to the Collegiate church and are now at New Brunswick.
All this having been done, the president of the consistory, Mahlon T. Hewitt, handed out the remaining letters of dismissal to D. W. Woodford, Robert R. Crosby, William Lain, Dr. Veranus Morse, John Van Flick, Henry Taylor and Albert I. Lyon, and made a formal closing address in which he offered "a sincere prayer that its old walls may still stand, and that it may continue to be the birthplace of souls into the kingdom of Christ." The prayer has been answered.
Thus ended the Protestant Reformed Dutch church in Market Street after just fifty years.
III
While the Market Street Reformed Church was fighting its last fight, a little congregation had come to life in the parlor of a sailor's boarding house. It was intended chiefly for "seamen and others," the "others" referring mostly to those who no longer sailed the seas. The first meeting was held June 7, 1864. Those were the days of sailing vessels; the New York of the thirties had been the ship building center of the world, especially from Pike Street up. At every pier sail boats were moored, coming from all over the world, and as they dismist their crews on arrival it left the men on shore unoccupied until their meager wages were gone, when they were crimped for another voyage. Low dance halls and worse were all along the river front and the sailor was their prey. The American Seamen's Friend Society sprang into being to improve the situation, and erected a fine building in Cherry Street, to give the men surroundings that were clean physically and spiritually. With the present federal laws for the protection of seamen the condition in the sixties can hardly be appreciated.