John Leach was paid $6 for the drawings of the South Church of Newport. He was also paid for raising its timber frame and later waived his design fee. An obscure architect/builder, he left a lasting imprint on our built environment.
John Leach was born in 1778 at Manchester (MA). His family moved along with several others to the southern part of Dunbarton (NH), around 1795. In 1805, he married Nancy Tenney, daughter of local builder William Tenney, who constructed many homes and also the town's meetinghouse. Leach may have worked for Tenney for some period, but one source states that William Tenney left his family over a dispute with his father-in-law, Judge Page, in 1796, several years before Leach’s marriage to Nancy. Dunbarton town records list John Leach as a carpenter but make no other comments about his work.
How did he end up in Newport? One member of South Church’s building committee, Deacon Caleb Heath, had moved to Newport from Bow (NH) in 1800 and may have known Tenney, if not Leach. So far, this seems the most likely connection but lacks evidence. After framing the South Church, Leach built two private homes, one for James Breck and another for Hubbard Newton, before leaving Newport. Within months of the Newport church's dedication in March 1823, John Leach designed and raised an Elias Carter-style church for the Presbyterian congregation in New Boston (NH). He then received commissions for the First Baptist Church and Merrimack County Bank in Concord (NH). Both were brick buildings that repeat certain design elements employed at the church at Newport. In 1827, he built the stone Episcopal church in Hopkinton—a Gothic Revival departure from his earlier work. In 1829, he designed and built the wooden Second Congregational (Unitarian) Church, which burned down while being outfitted for gas illumination in 1854.
By 1850, John Leach had retired and moved with Nancy to Concord; they are listed on both the 1850 and 1860 census for the city's 6th Ward. Perhaps ailing, they reported live-in domestic help on the 1860 census. John Leach, 85, died in Brooklyn (NY) at the close of the Civil War in the spring of 1865. He was residing with his son, Dr. John Leach, and his body was returned to Concord for burial. Nancy Leach died the following year at the age of 82.