This week’s piece of Civil War Era Brooklyn NY is First Unitarian Congregation. Completed in 1844 it stands at 48 Monroe Pl. in Historic Brooklyn Heights. My wife is a member of the board of trustees of this church. Although I am a Catholic, I often attend Sunday services here. To help me out in retelling this story, I have relied on the research done by one of its members, Olive Hoogenboom. She was a professional historian and was noted for her writing on women during the Civil War.
The church was an important center for liberal Christian theology. Unitarians like Ralph Waldo Emerson tried to incorporate rationality into religious understandings. First Unitarian was an important force in supporting emerging Unitarian congregations in Brooklyn and on Long Island.
The church played a role in the early life of Union General Francis Barlow, of Barlow’s Knoll at Gettysburg, and it also helped to originate the Brooklyn Sanitary Fair during the Civil War. I will tell those stories in good time, but first let us begin looking at the origins of the congregation. Unitarianism first got its start in the United States in New England. Many of its early adherents were descended from ancestors who were Puritans. After the beginning of the 19th Century, a number of them became Unitarian. John Adams and John Quincy Adams were both Unitarians and there were a sizeable number of Boston’s intellectuals who became involved during their time at Harvard University.
With the creation of the Erie Canal in the 1820s by New York State, many New Englanders moved to New York to take advantage of its key role as a transportation hub to the rapidly growing Ohio and states and territories in the Midwest. Unitarians, who were of a liberal bent, were particularly attracted to Brooklyn as a location to capitalize on Erie Canal tradecraft. It was known as both a “City of Churches” and as a place of free thought. At that time, Unitarians considered themselves Christians but did not believe in the Holy Trinity. Instead of believing in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, they believed that God was only manifested as God, which is the source of their name Unitarianism. They wanted to found a Christian church with many Americans not believing they were, in fact, Christians.
In 1833, ten New Englanders met and decided to found the First Unitarian Church in Brooklyn. This spread of Unitarianism to New York was a fairly recent development. The first Unitarian multi-congregational organization, the American Unitarian Association, had only been formed eight years before.
It is clear that Unitarian beliefs were circulating in New England by the time of the Revolution, but until the 19th Century and the rise of the American Unitarian Association, almost all Unitarian congregations were in eastern Massachusetts. The Unitarians tried to marry religious faith with the revelations of the Age of Enlightenment. Coming from a Puritan background, they explicitly rejected their ancestors Calvinist beliefs in predestination. Unitarians believed that each human being was capable of doing good or evil and that their church was to educate congregants to recognize good and to act in its accord.
Two Unitarian churches existed in Manhattan. All Souls Church was organized in 1819 and Church of the Messiah had its start in 1825. As New England settlers began to live in Brooklyn, they had to take a ferry across the East River to attend church. The Brooklyn Unitarians were tired of crossing the river every Sunday so they began organizing their own church.
In 1842, the transplanted New Englanders began work on the new church. In the photo below you can see how the church looks today, more or less how it looked when it was completed in 1844.
The church was built by transplanted New Englanders. It is a marked break architecturally from the Puritan model. Gothic in design, it resembles Catholic and Episcopal churches. The founders called it the Church of the Savior. However, before the work started on the church, the Unitarians in Brooklyn had organized a “homeless” congregation. They met as a congregation, but without a church building.
The Brooklynites wrote to the American Unitarian Association (AUA) in Boston requesting a minister. The congregants were worried that their liberal approach to religion made them unpopular with other Protestant congregations. In their 1833 letter to the AUA the Brooklynites said that having a skilled minister was very important because “considering the peculiar views entertained by a great portion of the people of Brooklyn respecting the Unitarian doctrine…our cause at the outset should be advocated by a preacher of eminent piety & talents.” In 1833, the church hired David Hatch Barlow as its first minister. This father of Francis Barlow offered services in Classical Hall, an auditorium erected by Seth Low, a member of the congregation. The Low family would be instrumental in the growth of Unitarianism in Brooklyn. Seth Low’s grandson was the first mayor of New York City that included both Manhattan and Brooklyn.
David Barlow was born in 1805. He was a Harvard graduate and his personality was attractive. When he came to be the first minister of the new congregation, Brooklyn was a compact village of about 20,000 people, but it was growing at a rate faster than Manhattan. With wealthy backers and an enlarging population, Barlow seemed to have landed in the right place.
The 1839 Economic Panic disrupted plans to begin building a new church. Many of the supporters of the church were merchants who had made their fortunes in trade. Some went out of business. Even Seth Low, the congregation’s richest member, faced bankruptcy. Fortunately for the congregation, Low’s trade with China, which included importing Opium into China, expanded during the Panic, saving his business.
As funding from donations to the church dried up, Rev. Barlow turned to drink. His wife, Almira Barlow, left the reverend and moved back to Brookline, Massachusetts. . She took her children with her, including Francis Barlow. Rev. Barlow followed her to Brookline, where he rented a room since Almira would not live with him. He sought help from medical professionals to help cure his addiction.
With a high pulpit and sensuous decorations, the spirit of Puritan severity is not in evidence.
After the Panic of 1837 receded into history, the church’s board again started plans for a new building. It was agreed that the church would be called Church of the Saviour. The congregation acquired a significant piece of Clover Hill in what is now Brooklyn Heights where Monroe Place and Pierrepont St. intersect in 1842. Minard Lafever was the architect who designed the church. When the church was finished, it marked the start of churches built in the Gothic Revival style in Brooklyn.
A baptismal font from 1846 is a treasured relic.
Samuel Longfellow was the minister at the Second Unitarian Church in Brooklyn, founded by members of First Unitarian. He was a dedicated Abolitionist. A parishioner complained that the congregation had rented all the pews but Longfellow preached “a John Brown sermon and drove them all away.” While Longfellow was so respected by the people of First Unitarian that they commemorated his death, Second Unitarian became known over the coming decades for its radical approach to theology.
All the side windows are Tiffany:
The church expanded its social action by helping to create housing for more than 1000 immigrants.
The church’s pastor said it is “well it is to provide hospitals for the cure of disease, but better to build homes which will prevent it.”
The area where the church is has over 700 buildings that were in existence at the time of the Civil War. Its main commercial area is just a block from the church with places to eat and have a drink. We like going to the Grand Canyon diner on Montague St. Nearby is Monty Q’s which is a low-priced New York pizza place. A lunch there costs just ten dollars.
The Brooklyn Historical Society. now the Brooklyn History Center, is across the street from the First Unitarian. The building was completed during the Civil War.
The court where I was sworn in as a lawyer is also across from the church.
The street the church is on is filled with pre-Civil War homes, like these built between 1845 and 1850.
More pre-1850 houses.
Some houses are marked with construction dates.
An imposing view of the Church’s front.
