Opening from On This Site - Native Long Island

Canoe Place Chapel

Canoe Place Chapel, built around 1819-1820, is a surviving place connected with Shinnecock Christian worship and community life at Canoe Place. Its history belongs to a wider landscape shaped by Shinnecock land, Rev. Paul Cuffee's ministry, nineteenth-century religious change, and later preservation. Canoe Place Chapel preserves a visible connection between Shinnecock community life and a place transformed by roads, rail, the canal, and land loss. The building also shows how Native Christian history can remain rooted in Indigenous kinship, land, and community authority. A 1797 Southampton map marks an "Indian Meeting House" east of the future Shinnecock Canal within land identified with the Shinnecock community. An 1829 map also marks a chapel in that area. These maps document Shinnecock worship at Canoe Place, but they do not by themselves prove that every marked building was the...