Photo courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center.
Union Church, a non-denominational Christian congregation, began as a Sunday School Society in a community hall in Pocantico Hills, New York, near John D. Rockefeller’s country estate, Kykuit. In 1922, Rockefeller and his son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., donated the site and $10,000 for the church’s first permanent building. Historically, Union has been the Rockefeller family’s church when they are in Westchester. The Fund gave regularly to the church from the 1940s through the 1970s, in some years contributing almost half of its operating budget. The building’s signal feature is its ten artist-designed stained glass windows. In 1948, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., commissioned Henri Matisse to design a window in honor of his late wife, Abby, and in turn his children commissioned a memorial window for him by Marc Chagall in 1960. The Rockefeller family then engaged Chagall to design all eight remaining windows after the 1961 death of Michael Rockefeller, son of founding RBF trustee Nelson Rockefeller.
Browse the major events in the Rockefeller Brothers Fund's history