A quarter-century later Russell Sturgis was commissioned to design the present structure, which took five years to complete, including a detailed Gothic interior.

It signaled Tarrytown's development as a suburb, especially after John D. Rockefeller and members of his family moved to the village and joined the church.

The church is a single-story structure of ashlar-patterned bluestone with brownstone trim, topped with a gabled roof shingled in slate.

[1] On the west (front) facade a small porte-cochère with brownstone columns, arched entries and buttresses shelters the main entrance.

Atop the tower is a slender spire shingled in slate, pierced by four smaller copper-roofed gabled dormer windows.

It retains its original hardwood narrow-board flooring and gas chandelier of brass and frosted glass with a Greek key design.

It has dark wooden walls and sliding doors, in contrast to the ceiling's golden oak curved rafters that converge at a decorative element.

Similar classical detailing on the house includes a modillioned and bracketed cornice, Adamesque garlanded friezes, and terra cotta escutcheon on the second story.

A revival that began in 1857 under William Wines, a pastor known for his abolitionism, almost tripled the church to 172 members by the end of the Civil War nine years later.

[1] After a year without a pastor, David Reeves, a veteran of the Confederate Army, walked all the way to Tarrytown from Alabama to take the job in 1867.

Russell Sturgis, the architect and critic who received the commission, was at the peak of his creative years following his designs for two of Yale University's oldest dormitories, Farnam and Durfee halls.

As a critic he had written for the journal New Path on the virtues of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England as applied to architecture, calling for simple buildings of solid construction and expressive of purpose, qualities his First Baptist Church of Tarrytown would embody.

The beginning of construction had to wait until 1874 due to the financial uncertainties created by the previous year's banking crisis.

Costs of construction ultimately reached $100,000 ($3.16 million in modern dollars[3]), well over the original budget, when the church was formally dedicated in 1881.

Originally, the interior walls were completely covered by the stencilled designs that today remain only between the ceiling rafters[1] At the time the church stood out within Tarrytown, which had only incorporated as a village a decade earlier.

First Baptist signalled that the village, once a riverside port town that served the farmers inland, was becoming a desirable residential suburb, a home away from the city for successful financiers and industrialists.

In particular, the Gothic stylings of the church were well-suited to a community located on a river that had begun to be referred to as "America's Rhine".

The rectory was built south of the church in 1896 through the generosity of Almira Geraldine Goodsell, wife of William Rockefeller, John's younger brother.

At that time the rectory was also renovated, with the first-floor rooms converted to Sunday school classrooms and office space and the second floor becoming the pastor's apartment.

[1] The church's creed affirms Scripture as the final authority over matters spiritual and temporal, the Holy Trinity, and the divinity of Christ.

"[A]ll men are sinners by nature and by choice, and their salvation is received only through faith in the atoning death of Jesus Christ."

Youth and children's ministries teach Sunday school and run special Bible study classes for those groups.

A missions committee organizes those activities,[6] which have supported work from New York City and Montreal to Argentina and Japan.