525 River Street, Mattapan.
A mission of All Saints’ Church in the 1880s. It was during George Bennitt’s tenure that All Saints’ began services in Mattapan, which later resulted in the establishment of the Church of the Holy Spirit, the only mission of All Saints’ to become a parish. Father Bennitt went to Mattapan because Annie Rotch offered to assist in the work there. In April 1895 fourteen communicants were set off from All Saints’ to Mattapan. The Church building was given by Annie Lawrence Lamb in memory of her father Benjamin Rotch. It is Dorchester’s second stone Gothic Revival church and was designed by Arthur Rotch to draw the puddingstone of the church and the grounds into a rural ensemble sensitive to the topography of the site. The Church of the Holy Spirit is the first recorded association of Ralph Adams Cram with church architecture, for he was an apprentice in Rotch’s office and drew sketches of the church. Twenty-five years later, after he designed All Saints’, Ashmont, and after he had become perhaps the most eminent ecclesiastical architect in the United States, he deisigned the parish house next to Rotch’s church.
In 1889 the Rev. John T. Magrath was rector.
For further information, consult:
King’s Hand-Book of Boston. )Boston: Moses King Corporation, 1889. 9th ed)
Shand Tucci, Douglass. All Saints’ Ashmont, Dorchester, Boston. A Centennial History of the Parish. (Boston: Published by the Parish, 1975)
Shand Tucci, Douglass. The Gothic Churches of Dorchester. (Issued by the Dorchester Savings Bank. Boston: Tribune Publishing Company, 1972)