1886 · Chapel Island, Lake KinnelonSt. Hubert's Chapel

The island chapel a tobacco magnate built for his wife — and the first liturgical commission of Louis Comfort Tiffany.

On the largest island in Lake Kinnelon stands a small stone chapel reachable only by boat. The cigarette magnate Francis S. Kinney raised it in the 1880s for his devout Catholic wife — and had Louis Comfort Tiffany decorate it, in what became the artist's first liturgical commission.

Documented

Built for a wife

The chapel was the gift of a husband to his wife. Francis S. Kinney — the Sweet Caporal cigarette magnate whose roughly 5,000-acre hunting-and-fishing retreat would later become Smoke Rise — was not himself Catholic, but his wife Mary was devout, and the nearest Catholic church was St. Anthony of Padua in Butler, seven miles away. So that she would not have to make that journey, Kinney resolved to build her a chapel of her own on the estate, and laid its cornerstone in 1886.

Documented

On the island

He set it on Chapel Island, the largest island in Lake Kinnelon — the lake Kinney had made from Stickle Pond — reachable only by boat, then as now. The chapel rose in native stone, and its first eight stained-glass windows were the work of William Gibson's Sons of New York. He named it for St. Hubert, the patron saint of hunters, in keeping with the estate's sporting life.

1889

Documented

Consecrated on the lake

Begun in 1886, the chapel was completed three years later and consecrated on October 25, 1889 by Bishop Winand M. Wigger of Newark, assisted by the friars of St. Anthony's in Butler. With that it became the first consecrated Roman Catholic place of worship in Kinnelon — a parish church in miniature on a private island.

Documented

The Tiffany commission

What makes the little chapel matter beyond Kinnelon is its interior. In 1889 Kinney commissioned Louis Comfort Tiffany and the Tiffany Glass Company to model the chapel on an eighth-century medieval church and to design its furnishings as a single integrated whole — widely regarded as Louis Comfort Tiffany's first liturgical commission, and one of the earliest fully integrated decorative schemes he ever undertook. The Tiffany work includes a Celtic-cross window, a marble mosaic floor, the altar and furnishings, and a bronze bas-relief dedication tablet by the Tiffany artist Jacob Adolphus Holzer. In the baptistry stands a marble figure, “The Angel of Resurrection,” sculpted by Antonio Tantardini in 1879 and brought from the tomb of Kinney's mother.

Documented

The thread to Our Lady

For decades St. Hubert's was the only Catholic place of worship in Kinnelon, serving the area's few Catholic families long after the Kinney era. That changed in the early 1950s, when a larger church — Our Lady of the Magnificat — rose a few miles away on Miller Road. The two chapels rhyme across seventy years: two husbands, two beloved wives, two chapels built in devotion. Francis Kinney raised this one for Mary; Henry Wise Miller built Our Lady of the Magnificat for Alice in 1954.

Today

Documented

A long silence, and a rescue

Francis Kinney's son Morris had no heirs, and at his death in 1945 the estate passed to his friend John Talbot, who developed it into the Smoke Rise community. The chapel itself slipped into long disuse and suffered an act of vandalism in 1957. It has since been rescued: the St. Hubert's Chapel Conservation Committee and the Kinnelon Heritage Conservation Society care for and restore it, and it opens to visitors by boat on a handful of private tours each year.

Local history

The 1957 vandalism and the details of the chapel's long custodianship come down largely through local history and the conservation groups' own accounts rather than a single archival record.

Frequently asked

What is St. Hubert's Chapel?

A Louis Comfort Tiffany–designed stone chapel on an island in Lake Kinnelon, raised by Francis Kinney for his wife Mary. Its cornerstone was laid in 1886 and it was consecrated in 1889; it carries Tiffany's first liturgical commission.

Source: Diocese of Paterson, “A Catholic Legacy”; Wikipedia

Who was Mary Kinney?

The devout Catholic wife of Francis S. Kinney. So that she would not have to travel seven miles to the nearest Catholic church in Butler, Kinney raised a stone chapel for her on an island in Lake Kinnelon — St. Hubert's — its cornerstone laid in 1886 and the chapel consecrated in 1889.

Source: Diocese of Paterson, “A Catholic Legacy”; Wikipedia

“A chapel on an island, built by one husband for his wife — and finished by the hand of Tiffany.”

Help us tell the chapel's story

This history grows with you

Much of St. Hubert's lives behind a locked door on a private island. If you can help — with permission to share — we'd be grateful:

  • Photographs of the chapel or its Tiffany interior (with permission to share)
  • The restoration story — the Conservation Committee and Heritage Society's work
  • How and when the chapel opens for boat tours

Your turn

Be the first to add to this history

A story, a correction, or a name we've missed — every piece helps. It takes a minute.

Sources

Compiled from publicly available sources; where accounts differ, the most widely documented version is used. Community corrections welcome.

Explore more of the Highlands

Smoke Rise
The Kinney Family
Kinnelon
Our Lady of the Magnificat
All history