It was April 1900, and the First Parish in Concord was putting the finishing touches on a splendid renovation of its historic meetinghouse on Lexington Road. No expense had been spared, for in a few days the parish would celebrate Easter Sunday, and less than a week later, the town would gather in its pews to honor the 125th anniversary of the minutemen’s victory at the North Bridge.

As the sun set on Wednesday, April 11, carpenters and electricians packed up their tools, and painters stowed their cleaning rags in a closet. They headed home, pleased with their work. 

Around 2:30 on Thursday morning, a night watchman named Patrick Varney was patrolling the silent streets when he spotted flames in the meetinghouse. He rushed to the nearest fire-alarm box—a brand-new system getting its first use—and pulled the handle.

Willard Farrar, the sexton of the nearby Trinitarian Congregational Church, heard the commotion and sprinted toward the burning meetinghouse. He forced his way in through a locked door, grabbed the bell rope, and with all his might he rang the First Parish bell, which was considerably louder than the town’s new fire alarm.

Farrar fearlessly rang the bell until 3:30, when the steeple itself was engulfed in flames, and he escaped moments before the blazing structure collapsed.¹

The next day, the governing board of the First Parish received a letter from their counterparts at the Trinitarian church. “We tender to you for your use our meeting house, as long as you desire… [the] facilities of the building are freely at your disposal.”²

The Trinitarian Congregational Church had been founded nearly seventy-five years earlier by First Parish members who defected over doctrinal disputes. But when disaster struck, all conflicts of theology were swept aside by the moral imperative to help a neighbor in need.

For almost two hundred years, the First Parish was the only church in Concord. Parish business was town business, and vice versa. Rev. Peter Bulkeley wasn’t just the parish’s first minister, he was also one of the town’s founders and financed much of its early growth, including the grist mill from which the Milldam neighborhood takes its name. The mill stood roughly where Main Streets Café is now.

Amos Doolittle’s 1775 print of British soldiers in Concord shows part of the 1711 meetinghouse on the left. The building on the far right with the belfry is the courthouse that was built using components of the 1673 meetinghouse.

| public domain

The parish built a meetinghouse on the ridge overlooking present-day Lexington Road and buried their dead in the churchyard, now known as the Old Hill Burying Ground. In 1673, they built a new meetinghouse across the road, near the present Wright Tavern. That building, a square gabled structure topped with a belfry, was later dismantled and reassembled 500 feet away to become the courthouse that can be seen in Amos Doolittle’s 1775 print of British soldiers marching into Concord center. 

The meetinghouse that is partly visible in Doolittle’s picture was built in 1711. It was much larger than its predecessor and required considerable labor to build. Instead of cash, the workers were paid in food and drink, which included “barrels of rum,” according to contractors’ records.³  

The next year, the parish called Rev. John Whiting as its minister. Whiting was a popular preacher, more liberal in his theology than his Puritan predecessors. Unfortunately, his performance of his duties was somewhat impaired by a “fondness for the flowing bowl,”⁴ and in 1737 the parish replaced him with Rev. Daniel Bliss. Bliss was a “New Light” preacher whose fiery sermons drove some parishioners to form their own congregation with Rev. Whiting presiding. Perhaps fittingly, Rev. Whiting’s renegade flock met in the Black Horse Tavern on Main Street at Sudbury Road (the present Library site).

After Bliss’ death, the First Parish installed a young Harvard graduate as its new minister. His name was William Emerson, and although he hailed from Malden, Massachusetts, he had Concord roots, being descended from Rev. Peter Bulkeley. He married his predecessor’s daughter, Phebe Bliss, and they built the house we call the Old Manse as a home for their growing family. 

Emerson ascended to Concord’s pulpit in 1765, the same year the Stamp Act provoked the rage of the American colonies against their mother country. His vocal support for the colonists’ rights earned him the nickname of “Patriot Preacher.” He welcomed the Provincial Congress to use the Concord meetinghouse in 1774 to plot Massachusetts’ resistance to English rule, and the following year, he invited Harvard University to hold classes there while the fledgling Continental Army trained recruits on the Cambridge campus.

This model shows the First Parish Meetinghouse as it appeared between 1791 and 1841. 

| Model of First Parish Church by John Wesson, 1841. Concord Museum Collection, Gift of Cummings E. Davis. M408.

No armchair patriot, Emerson joined the Army himself as a chaplain in 1776, but his service and his life were cut short by dysentery. His widow, Phebe, struggled to raise their five children, and eventually remarried—to her late husband’s successor, Rev. Ezra Ripley. 

Ezra Ripley became Concord’s pastor in 1778 and continued in that role for an astonishing 63 years, until his death at age 90. Over his long ministry, he devoted himself to building a harmonious community rather than splitting theological hairs, but eventually his more orthodox-minded parishioners—including some Thoreau family members—resigned to form the Trinitarian Church in 1825. Those who remained faithful to the First Parish called themselves Unitarian, as they still do.⁵

1841 saw great changes at First Parish. One was a change of leadership, as Rev. Barzillai Frost became senior minister after Ezra Ripley’s death. The other was a change of architecture, as the historic meetinghouse was dismantled and rebuilt perpendicular to its old footprint. The steeple, which had previously faced Main Street, now faced Lexington Road, as it does now. 

A few years later, in 1844, an excited Henry David Thoreau arrived at the meetinghouse asking the sexton to ring the bell. Ralph Waldo Emerson was about to give an antislavery address, and Henry wanted the bell to summon the whole town to hear him. When the sexton refused, Henry burst in and seized the bell rope—much as Willard Farrar would do more than half a century later—and lustily rang the bell himself.

The First Parish bell that Henry David Thoreau rang in 1844 was salvaged from the 1900 fire and occupies a place of honor in front of the meetinghouse. 

| Photo by Dianne Weiss

The bell that Henry rang was damaged beyond repair when the meetinghouse burned in 1900. But parishioners preserved it, and it now occupies a place of honor on the front lawn of the meetinghouse, where a plaque tells of the bell’s connection to Concord’s literary and antislavery heritage. 

NOTES

¹Edward Wesley Tucker, “The Meeting Houses of the First Parish,” in The Meeting House on the Green (John Whittemore Teele, ed.), First Parish in Concord, 1985. ²David Britton Little, “Concord and Its Churches,” in Teele, op. cit. ³Edward Wesley Tucker, “The Meeting Houses of the First Parish,” in Teele, op. cit.

⁴Eric Parkman Smith, The Church in Concord and Its Ministers, (pamphlet), 1971. ⁵The Unitarian and Universalist denominations merged in 1961, so the First Parish now officially identifies as Unitarian Universalist.