File:First United Methodist Church, North Tonawanda, New York - 20230222.jpg

English: First United Methodist Church, 65 Main Street at Tremont Street, North Tonawanda, New York, February 2023. Built in 1882, this lovely old church exemplifies the Carpenter Gothic style with its wood-frame construction, asymmetrical façade, and somewhat stouter-than-normal massing (accentuated further by the truncated steeple and the bluntness of the requisite pointed arches above the windows and doors). The scroll-sawn decorative woodwork typically seen on the exterior of buildings of the style is decidedly understated here, but do note the unusual right-angled half-timbering. As its name indicates, this is the earliest religious congregation to have set up shop in the Tonawanda: it was properly incorporated in 1842, but traces its earliest roots back two or three additional decades, to the days of the itinerant "circuit riders" who crisscrossed the frontier hinterlands of New York State holding services for pioneer communities on an irregular basis wherever they could find space. From 1831, those services typically took place in the small brick schoolhouse built by the Sweeney brothers on the present site of the church, and when the school moved to a different location, the building was sold to the Methodists outright. Construction of the current structure began in 1880; an Education Building was added on its north side in 1963.