Panel 5: Contested Community and Cultural Spaces
Event Title
Anglicized History: a Response to Immigration, Urbanization and World War at First Parish Church in Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1913-1930
Location
Campus Center, Room 3540, University of Massachusetts Boston
Start Date
29-3-2014 10:45 AM
End Date
29-3-2014 12:00 PM
Description
In the fall of 2013, I surveyed, cataloged and conducted research on many of the physical tributes and memorials at First Parish Church in Dorchester, Massachusetts. At the time, the church’s steeple was rebuilt and the exterior of the 1897 Colonial Revival wood meetinghouse was repaired and repainted bright white. The congregation hopes the building restoration will help it to grow and to continue to serve Dorchester.
Yet there is a disconnect between the traditional narrative of the church, with the building as a symbol, and the need to attract new members. The narrative is that the church was founded in 1630 by (white) Puritans from England who were inspired Reverend John White, also of England; they founded Dorchester; ran the town for many years; helped start things, like Harvard University; and built the meetinghouse in 1897 to replicate their 1816 building.
This narrative barely covers the church’s activities in the anti-slavery-Abolitionist movement, Progressivism, civic and charitable service, Liberalism or the congregation’s theological evolution from Unitarian to the more inclusive Unitarian Universalist. In 1930, a historical sketch and memorials to celebrate the tercentennial re-emphasized the English and colonial roots and this narrative has endured.
Since the landmark building cannot be substantially altered, what parts of the church’s history, can be restored to prominence to balance the Colonial Revivalist narrative and material history? How would First Parish’s history be updated? Could it be reinterpreted from an origin story to a narrative of responses to change? Church records and archives have traces of corporate, congregational and theological modernism. My paper will explore the period between 1937 and the early 1940s when the church experienced a generational change in membership and lay and ministerial leadership, perhaps a time when First Parish looked beyond it history to its future.
Anglicized History: a Response to Immigration, Urbanization and World War at First Parish Church in Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1913-1930
Campus Center, Room 3540, University of Massachusetts Boston
In the fall of 2013, I surveyed, cataloged and conducted research on many of the physical tributes and memorials at First Parish Church in Dorchester, Massachusetts. At the time, the church’s steeple was rebuilt and the exterior of the 1897 Colonial Revival wood meetinghouse was repaired and repainted bright white. The congregation hopes the building restoration will help it to grow and to continue to serve Dorchester.
Yet there is a disconnect between the traditional narrative of the church, with the building as a symbol, and the need to attract new members. The narrative is that the church was founded in 1630 by (white) Puritans from England who were inspired Reverend John White, also of England; they founded Dorchester; ran the town for many years; helped start things, like Harvard University; and built the meetinghouse in 1897 to replicate their 1816 building.
This narrative barely covers the church’s activities in the anti-slavery-Abolitionist movement, Progressivism, civic and charitable service, Liberalism or the congregation’s theological evolution from Unitarian to the more inclusive Unitarian Universalist. In 1930, a historical sketch and memorials to celebrate the tercentennial re-emphasized the English and colonial roots and this narrative has endured.
Since the landmark building cannot be substantially altered, what parts of the church’s history, can be restored to prominence to balance the Colonial Revivalist narrative and material history? How would First Parish’s history be updated? Could it be reinterpreted from an origin story to a narrative of responses to change? Church records and archives have traces of corporate, congregational and theological modernism. My paper will explore the period between 1937 and the early 1940s when the church experienced a generational change in membership and lay and ministerial leadership, perhaps a time when First Parish looked beyond it history to its future.
Comments
PANEL 5 of the 2013 Graduate History Conference features presentations and papers under the topic of "Contested Community and Cultural Spaces."