He was born in Deerfield, Massachusetts on February 1, 1820. He was the son of Edward Clark and Fanny (Smith) Houghton and a descendant of Ralph Houghton who emigrated from England in the middle of the seventeenth century to Massachusetts. At the age of fourteen George Houghton left his Puritan home for New York.
After varied experiences, including that of teaching, he entered the University of the City of New York and was graduated in 1842. He studied theology under the direction of William A. Muhlenberg at the same time teaching Greek in St. Paul's College, Flushing, Long Island, of which Muhlenberg was headmaster.
The Oxford (High-Church) Movement, which began in England in 1833, made a lasting impression on him. He was ordained deacon in 1845 and priest in 1846, and was Muhlenberg's curate at the Church of the Holy Communion in New York until 1847. Then, after a period of non-parochial activity, when he ministered to the sick and dying in Bellevue Hospital and devoted his time to the underprivileged, he established regular religious services at 48 East Twenty-Fourth Street, the furnishings for the improvised church consisting of borrowed school benches, a wheezy parlor organ, and a reading desk of pine wood. The parish was organized February 12, 1849, as the Church of the Transfiguration in the City of New York. Later a site on Twenty-ninth Street, just east of Fifth Avenue, was purchased, and a new building was erected which was first occupied on March 10, 1850. The present building was completed in 1864. Houghton's salary was augmented, beginning in 1850, by five hundred dollars a year, received as professor of Hebrew in the General Theological Seminary.
Houghton responded in every way to the needs of those who called upon him for help. During the Civil War, it is said, he harbored negroes on their way to the Canadian border; he established a war hospital, and during the Draft Riots of 1863 he sheltered hundreds of helpless negro children driven by a mob from the Colored Orphan Asylum at Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street. Events following the death of the famous comedian, George Holland, in 1870, gave Houghton's church its popular name and made it famous throughout America.
Joseph Jefferson and Holland's son called on the Rev. William T. Sabine, rector of the Church of the Atonement on Fifth Avenue, to make arrangements for Holland's funeral. On learning that Holland had been an actor, Sabine refused to take the service. What followed, Joseph Jefferson recorded in these words: "I paused at the door and said: 'Well, sir, in this dilemma is there no other church to which you can direct me, from which my friend can be buried?' He replied that 'there was a little church around the corner' where I might get it done; to which I answered: 'Then, if this be so, God bless "the little church around the corner, "' and so I left the house" (The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson, 1890, p. 340). News stories, editorials, and songs on the variety stage gave emphasis to the incident, which endeared the rector to the people of the stage and has ever since made the Little Church around the Corner a shrine to the acting profession, who were known to Houghton thenceforth as "the kindly folk. "
Houghton's wife was Caroline Graves Anthon, the daughter of John Anthon of New York.
