Outline History of The First Unitarian Church of Rochester

The First Unitarian Church of Rochester was founded in 1829. The small congregation met mostly in members' homes and rental spaces at first, but it strengthened when Myron Holley, a Unitarian abolitionist leader, arrived in Rochester and offered his unofficial preaching services to the congregation. The congregation hired a regular minister in 1841.

Two weeks after the world's first women's rights convention met at Seneca Falls in 1848, a follow-up women's rights convention met at the First Unitarian Church Rochester. Organized primarily by progressive Quakers, several of whom had already joined the church, it became the first convention of both men and women in the U.S. to elect a woman as its chair.

The influx of progressive Quaker families into the church included a young woman named Susan B. Anthony, who soon became a leader in the movement to abolish slavery and later became the most prominent leader of the women's suffrage movement.

The "radicals" in the congregation operated secretive stops on the Underground Railroad to assist self-emancipated African Americans on their journey through Rochester to freedom in Canada. Many of those same activists also worked for voting rights for women. Conflicts within the congregation between those who supported such activities and those who did not disrupted the church for several years in the 1850s. After First Unitarian’s building burned just before the Civil War, the exhausted congregation went without formal services until the war was over. The congregation regrouped after the war and constructed a new building.

Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from enslavement and moved to Rochester to publish an abolitionist newspaper, formed strong friendships with several members of First Unitarian. They provided crucial assistance to him when he had to flee secretly to Canada just before the Civil War.

Newton Mann, who became First Unitarian’s minister in 1870, reflected the congregation’s willingness to reexamine traditional beliefs by advocating what he called a rational approach to the Bible, which, he said, would make it more appealing by giving it "a purely human quality which quite atones for all the mistakes it contains." During his ministry, the church developed an unusually close relationship with Temple B'rith Kodesh, Rochester’s first Jewish congregation, leading some people to speculate that the two congregations might merge.

William Gannett arrived as minister in 1889. He had been a national leader of the successful movement among Unitarians to dispense with an official creed and to welcome people with a variety of religious beliefs, including non-Christians and non-theists. With the assistance of B'rith Kodesh, William and his wife Mary, who was practically his co-minister, developed the Boys' Evening Home in the church’s chapel building to serve its downtown neighborhood of low-income families, many of whom were Jewish immigrants. At least four members of the Boys' Evening Home went on to become rabbis and another was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Rev. Gannett delivered the main address at Frederick Douglass's funeral in Rochester in 1895. Booker T. Washington, the African American president of the Tuskegee Institute, later said, "No other in the United States was better qualified by natural disposition and breadth of mind to give adequate estimate of Douglass as a man."

The church continued to strengthen during the following decades, and, despite its reputation for having unconventional views, played an important role in community affairs. During the ministry of David Rhys Williams in the 1930s and 1940s, the congregation at various times included a member of Congress, the head of the Rochester Board of Education, and the owner of both of Rochester’s daily newspapers.

In the 1950s, the church's building was demolished to make way for Midtown Plaza, a shopping mall in the heart of downtown. Louis Kahn, an internationally known architect, was chosen to design the building that First Unitarian occupies today.

The national organizations of the Unitarians and the Universalists merged in 1961 to form the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). Rochester's First Unitarian and First Universalist Churches considered the possibility of merging their congregations but decided instead to retain separate identities while continuing their warm relationship.

Rev. Shari Halliday-Quan is currently the lead minister of First Unitarian. Now one of the largest congregations in the UUA, the church continues to work for social justice, foster spiritual growth, be open to new ideas, and strive to be a more inclusive community.