Council Adds Four More Properties to Local Historic Places Register

Fredericton (December 13, 2010) – St. Anne’s Chapel of Ease and St. Anne’s Anglican Church, adjoining places of worship at 245 Westmorland Street are the latest historically significant properties to be included in the City of Fredericton’s Historic Places Register.

City Council approved the two church buildings for inclusion in the Register today along with two distinctive homes in the St. Anne’s Point Heritage Preservation Area in Fredericton South, one at 162 Winslow Street and the other at 127 Lansdowne Street.

St. Anne’s Chapel of Ease is a small Anglican Gothic Revival stone, which opened in 1847. It was originally called St. Anne’s Parish Church. The name was changed to St. Anne’s Chapel of Ease when a new adjoining church was built in the 1960s. St. Anne’s

was planned by Fredericton’s first Anglican Bishop, John Medley to fulfill a need during construction of Christ Church Cathedral. St. Anne’s is the earliest North American structure completed by Frank Wills, a young British architect who immigrated to Fredericton to assist Bishop Medley.

St. Anne’s has survived virtually unchanged in its more than 160 year history. It is universally regarded as “the finest small North American Parish Church of its date in the English Gothic Revival style. Based on thirteenth century parish churches St. Anne’s Chapel of Ease was designated a Canadian National Historic Site in 1992.

St. Anne’s Anglican Church is a modern stone and concrete-clad church opened in 1962. The original Church could no longer meet the demands of parishioners. Designed by Stanley Emmerson of Saint John and John Feeney of Fredericton, the church was built to a similar height, size and materials as the original church. St. Anne’s Parish Church is one of the few distinguished pairings in New Brunswick of modern and historic architecture. The structurally expressive, open and light-filled modern church accentuates the darker, more enclosed and ornate qualities of its Gothic Revival ancestor.

The one-and-a-half-storey wood-frame house at 161 Winslow Street was built in 1934 for the University of New Brunswick Dean of Forestry J. Miles Gibson, who helped create the Maritime Forest Ranger School at the university.

One of the first houses constructed on Winslow Street, the house features a gambrel roof, a balanced front façade, large rectangular windows and a central front door surmounted by a transom flanked by sidelights. It has an open portico supported by slim columns, topped by triangular pediment.

Built in the early 1920s, the concrete-block, two-storey house at 127 Lansdowne Street was built on a portion of a significant Loyalist land grant, near the corner of Waterloo Row. Concrete block was an affordable building material, and houses constructed of this material often reflect a response to the local economic climate or a shortage in available building supplies. The home features a low-pitched hip roof, a central dormer and regularly spaced rectangular windows. Its open front porch is supported by cast columns and it has a triangular pediment surmounting porch entrance.