It is one of several Lutheran churches in the area that trace their roots to Palatine German emigrants in the early 18th century.

Its late 19th-century brick building is a sophisticated application of the Romanesque Revival architectural style by a New York City architect.

[1] The main entrance is at a small one-story flat-roofed stone porch, with its archivolts likewise in sandstone.

It rises to a broached top with round-arched openings on all four sides and a rounded copper-roofed stair turret.

[1] Inside, the church has plaster walls, wainscoting and deeply recessed windows and doors.

Just north of the church is the parsonage, a Queen Anne-style two-and-a-half-story house with high-pitched roof and wraparound porch.

To its north is the parish hall, a Victorian Gothic frame house, whose steeply pitched roof is complemented by a bracketed cornice and pointed-arch windows.

The cemetery office nearby is a one-story frame building with gabled roof and garage doors.

Several paved and unpaved lanes cross it to provide vehicular access to graves, dividing it into 20 sections, their routes corresponding to former lot boundaries.

[1] Lutheranism came to northwestern Dutchess County in the 1710s, with Palatine German refugees from the War of Spanish Succession.

After an attempt to cultivate naval stores on the lands of Robert Livingston in today's Columbia County, they were released[clarification needed].

Some settled in the Rhinebeck and Red Hook areas at the invitation of another large local landholder, Henry Beekman.

[1] In 1729 the Lutherans left, either due to a dispute with their Calvinist countrymen or because their congregation had grown enough to require its own church.

[1] That church bought a five-acre (2 ha) plot in Red Hook at the current location in 1796 and moved in six years later.

Work on the cellar in 1956 led to the removal of an original porte cochère and the addition of an endwall chimney on the south side.

In 2008 it proposed to the village that it demolish the caretaker's cottage and parish hall in order to resubdivide the property and create five new buildable lots.