New Rochelle's Huguenot Parish

New Rochelle was founded in sixteen eighty-eight by French Huguenots, Protestant refugees who fled France after King Louis the Fourteenth revoked the Edict of Nantes, stripping their legal protections. A group of about thirty Huguenot families bought six thousand acres on Long Island Sound and named their settlement after La Rochelle, their port city in France. Trinity-Saint Paul's Episcopal Church traces its congregation directly to those founders, making it one of the oldest continuously worshipping congregations in New York.

The current stone church was completed in eighteen sixty-four, but the parish records run back to seventeen oh nine. New Rochelle today has about eighty thousand residents, and while its Huguenot identity is largely historical, the church remains, the records remain, and the street names, Huguenot among them, carry the founding story.