Applicable National Register Criteria lark "X" in one or more boxes for the criteria qualifying the prope r National Register listin A B Property is associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history. Property is associated with the lives of persons significant in our past. Property embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction or epresents the work of a master, or possesses high rtistic values, or represents a significan and distinguishable entity whose components lack Property has yielded, or is likely to yield, information important in prehistory or history.
Suffolk, MA County and State Areas of Significance (Enter categories from instructions Architecture Religion Period of Significance 1912-1960 Significant Dates 1914 - building dedication Criteria Considerations (Mark "x" in all the boxes that apply) Property is: owed by a religious institution or used for religious A purposes. B removed from its original location. C a birthplace or grave. D a cemetery. E a reconstructed building, object, or structure. F a commemorative property. G less than 50 years old or achieving significance within the past 50 years. Significant Person (Complete only if Criterion B is marked above) Cultural Affiliation Architect/Builder Cram, Ralph Adams - Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, Arch.
Norcross Brothers Company, builder Period of Significance (justification) The period of significance extends from the design and construction of the church by important American architect Ralph Adams Cram (between 1912 and 1914) through fifty years from the present (1960) to reflect the ongoing associations of the property as the Second Church of Boston. 6 Second Church in Boston Name of Property Suffolk, MA County and State Statement of Significance Summary Paragraph (provide a summary paragraph that includes level of signficance and applicable criteria) The Second Church of Boston is a handsome Georgian Revival building designed 1912 by one of the nation's most noted architects, Ralph Adams Cram, for Boston's leading Unitarian Universalist congregation, one that had numerous homes since it was founded in 1649.
Ralph Adams Cram, then associated with the firm of Cram and Ferguson, was architect for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City and supervising architect of Princeton University. The Second Church is strikingly executed in the Georgian Revival style and represents a unique departure from the familiar Gothic Revival church forms for which Cram is best known. The Second Church is prominently sited on Audubon Circle, an architecturally distinguished residential neighborhood established at the Boston/Brookline boundary at the end of the 19"h century by Frederick Law Olmsted, America's most influential landscape architect and city planner. The church retains integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association.
It meets criterion A of the National Register, with significance at the local level, for its associations with the changing face of Unitarianism in the early 20* century and the movement's influence in Boston. As a significant and well-preserved example of the work of Ralph Adams Cram, and one that was conceived and executed in a style not normally associated with the architect, it also meets National Register criterion C at the local level. Narrative Statement of Significance (provide at least one paragraph for each area of significance) The Second Church in Boston is architecturally significant as an unusual Georgian Revival-style design by noted architect Ralph Adams Cram who is principally associated with the revival of the Gothic style in American church design.
Although Cram and his partners worked in a variety of styles, his most notable projects, including All Saints' Episcopal Church in Boston and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, are a mixture of Gothic and Romanesque Revival styles, and he was universally credited with a new 20'-century approach to ecclesiastic design, albeit one which relied heavily on long-ago influences. The Second Church is an outstanding reminder that Cram's skill in religious design was not limited to a particular style. The church is significant under the area of religion as the current location of one of Boston's most notable and historic parishes.
The Second Church was founded in 1649, and was served by several important American theologians, including the Mather family (Samuel, Increase, Cotton, and his son Samuel), John Lathrop, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose three-year career at the Second Church was his only pulpit assignment. During the church's history, its primary religious doctrine changed from Puritanism to Calvinism to Unitarianism, a new American denomination established by the Second Church's John Lathrop. Becoming gradually more liberal, the Second Church introduced features such as a church organ and Sunday School to Boston congregations.
Mid 19"-century doctrine became conservative in nature, as the Second Church attracted a wealthier clientele, and the parish itself experienced several physcial moves, mirroring the westward movement of many Boston institutions from downtown to the rapidly emerging Back Bay district, to its current location in the early 20" century. Today's Second Church is the only extant church building for this historic parish and it is the longest-lived location in its more-than-three-century history. 7 Second Church in Boston Name of Property Suffolk, MA County and State Developmental history/additional historic context information (if appropriate) Unitarianism in America and Boston Unitarianism, a liberal religious theology and church denomination with deep roots in New England, was flourishing in Boston when construction of the Second Church building began in 1912.
Espousing a form of Christianity that affirmed God's existence but rejected the doctrine of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost), the earliest Unitarian churches were established in Eastern Europe in the mid 16" century and in England in the 17" century. As the movement evolved, the belief became institutionalized that Jesus was not the son of God, but a man with a unique relationship to God. Unitarianism stressed the importance of rational thinking, the individual's direct relationship with God, and the humanity of Jesus. The movement was brought to America in the 18th century and thrived in the early nation's embrace of religious freedom, emerging primarily in Congregational churches that chose to remove the concept of the Trinity from their liturgies.
Conflicts between Unitarian and Trinitarian factions of Congregational parishes in the late 18"h century led to an eventual break from Congregationalism and the establishment of a single Unitarian denomination, the American Unitarian Association, in 1825. In the 19* century, under the influence of Trancendentalism and actively engaged in national debates about war and pacifism, Unitarians acquired their present focus on religious pluralism. In 1961, the Unitarian denomination merged with the Universalists, a group believing in universal salvation, to form the new denomination of Unitarian Universalism. The First and Second Churches in Boston prior to 1912 In Boston, the seeds of Unitarianism took root in Christian churches that were founded by Puritans and grounded in Calvinistic theology.
Such was the case at the Second Church, a successor congregation to the First Church, Boston's oldest church established by covenant in 1630 as the first act of John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company. The Second Church was founded in 1649 by seven Puritan laymen when the First Church could no longer meet the needs of its growing, geographically dispersed, congregation. Established at North Square in Boston's North End, the meetinghouse was referred to as the "Old North Meeting House." The Second Church became one of the largest and most influential churches in the New World and one of the first to shake off the harsh Calvinist theology of its founders. Reverend Samuel Mather (1626-1671) preached the dedicatory sermon and was made minister in 1650, foreshadowing the "Mather Dynasty" that would lead the church through four generations of Mather ministers.
The church prospered under Samuel's brother Increase (1639-1723), a staunch Puritan who took the pulpit in 1664 and supervised construction of a new church on the same site when the edifice was destroyed by fire in 1676. He served as president of Harvard College while holding the pulpit at Second Church and was an active participant in colony politics and governance, helping to negotiate a new colony charter with King James II. Increase was involved in the Salem witch hysteria, defending the judges and trials but denouncing the spectral evidence they relied upon. Increase was succeeded by his son Cotton (1663-1728), a man of keen intelligence who spoke Latin at age eleven and earned two Harvard degrees before he was 19. A scholar and scientist, he published prolifically and promoted education and public health, including early experiments with smallpox inoculation.
His Magnalia Christi Americana, a collection of writings on the ecclesiastical history of New England, had great influence in its time. Like his father, Cotton believed in witchcraft and contributed to the witch fever that gripped the region. Despite his erudition and notable achievements, Cotton is best remembered for his stern Puritanism and his role in the witch hunts. Cotton's son Samuel (1706-1785) ascended to the pulpit and a congregation of 350 members in 1732 and began to effect a gradual liberalization of the Mather family and the Second Church. Samuel strayed so far from his father's theology, in fact, that he was forced to resign in 1741 for "looseness of doctrine." He took a splinter congregation with him to form the Tenth Congregational Church in Boston, which eventually rejoined Second Church in 1785.
(continued) 8 Second Church in Boston Name of Property Suffolk, MA County and State John Lathrop (1740-1816), who became minister in 1768 at the age of 28, was responsible for the church's role as the "patriot church" during the Revolution. Challenging Britain's political and economic tryanny in inflammatory sermons, Lathrop, along with church member and "midnight rider" Paul Revere, promoted the cause of liberty. On January 16, 1776, the church building at North Square, known to Tories as home to "a nest of traitors," was destroyed by order of British General Howe, obstensibly to obtain firewood.
(The destroyed building is not be confused with the legendary Old North Church on Salem Street in Boston's North End.) Reverend Lathrop and his congregation were invited to hold joint services with the New Brick Church on Hanover Street (not extant), a 1721 spinoff congregation of Second Church. The two congregations merged in 1779. A replica of the gold cockerel weathervane that graced the steeple at the New Brick Church for more than two centuries sits today atop the steeple at Second Church/Ruggles Baptist Church at Audubon Circle. Over the course of his 48-year ministry at Second Church, John Lathrop revised his Calvinist views and moved his congregation towards Unitarianism. By 1802, the transformation was complete, and in 1815 Lathrop helped establish the American Unitarian Association and the new denomination.
Another founder of the American Unitarian Association, the progressive Reverend Henry Ware, age 23, was ordained to succeed Lathrop in 1817. Ware oversaw the installation of an organ at the church, a daring innovation that contradicted church edicts that pipe organs were pretentious and not appropriate for religious music. The Second Church also broke new ground with the establishment of one of Boston's first Sunday Schools for children. Ralph Waldo Emerson was named associate minister in 1829 at age 26 for what would be his only pulpit assignment. Although Emerson would later make enormous contributions to liberal thought in America, his ministry at Second Church was uneventful until his departure in 1832 over the issue of communion.
He came to believe that communion should be a spiritual, not material, observance, and proposed to the congregation that it be conducted as a simple commemorative gathering without bread and wine. The church rejected Emerson's proposal but asked him to stay on as minister. Unable to continue in good conscience, he explained his position in a sermon and graciously resigned. Emerson feared that religion would "strangle itself in formality, creeds, ritual and ceremony." ' His 1840 address to the Harvard Divinity School (Unitarian from its formation in 1816), in which he challenged the traditional purpose and views of the church, caused great upheaval in the Unitarian community. Most New England Unitarian congregations, uncomfortable with Emerson's extremism, chose a more cautious course.
Ironically, despite Harvard Divinity School's role as the epicenter of religious liberalism in America, New England Unitarianism became markedly conservative while the rest of the country embraced the more progressive views expressed by Emerson and the Harvard-trained Unitarian ministers. These included recognition of the 1) errors of the Trinity, 2) the humanity of Jesus, 3) the moral enormity of atonement, 4) the discovery of truth through experience, not revelation, and 5) the theological misuse of alleged miracles. Chandler Robbins, Emerson's successor at Second Church, led his church down the conservative branch path of Unitarianism. During his ministry from 1833 to 1874, the congregation became settled and staid, courting orthodoxy and no longer attracting the the city's liberal elite.
Robbins distanced himself from the social issues of the time and the activism of his predecessors; church historian John Booth said that the "Second Church pulpit became strangely silent" during the slavery debates leading to the Civil War.' In Robbins' 320-page history of the Second Church, published in 1852, he barely made reference to Unitarianism. During Robbins' tenure, the Second Church occupied five different church buildings and four temporary worship spaces. The New Brick Church building was condemned and demolished in 1844, and replaced by an ornate brownstone Gothic church that overran the budget and had to be sold in 1848. In 1850, the congregation purchased the Freeman Place Chapel on Beacon Hill (not extant), and four years later merged with the Church of the Savior and moved into the Savior church building on Bedford Street (not extant).
Another budget disaster, the Church of the Savior was a Gothic style confection by artist and architect Hammat Billings that was described at the time as one of Boston's most beautiful churches. Billings designed the Tremont Street Methodist Church, the Temple Club on West Street, and the Pilgrim monument in Plymouth, Massachusetts. (continued) Second Church in Boston Name of Property Suffolk, MA County and State In 1872, amid a general exodus of affluent society to the Back Bay, and with businesses crowding the North End neighborhood and parishioners moving away, the Second Church purchased property on Boylston Street at Copley Square. The Bedford Street church was disassembled and reassembled into a new building that was dedicated in 1874 (not extant).
The Second Church now sat near two flourishing Unitarian churches, First Church and Arlington Street Church, both more theologically liberal than the Second Church. Reverend Thomas Van Ness was made minister in 1893 and continued the congregation's movement towards a conservative, Episcopalian-style liturgy. He led preparations for Second Church's 250" anniversary in 1899, for which the church commissioned four works of art. These included "Truth," a tesseraie mosaic by Tiffany Studios installed behind the altar. The mosaic showed a figure in a Byzantine cowl holding the sword of truth in his right hand, the torch of enlightenment in his left hand, and the key of knowledge around his neck.
Two glass windows were installed on either side of the chancel - one illustrating the protest of Increase Mather against the surrender of the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter, and the other the courage of charity. A marble bust of Ralph Waldo Emerson commemorated his only settled ministry at Second Church. (The memorials were all moved to the new church building in 1914.) As the end of the 19# century approached, failure to thrive in its Copley Square location (blamed on competition from nearby liberal churches and the influx of business interests) led the church to explore a series of alternatives, including church mergers and relocation. Ultimately, it accepted an offer of $475,000 from private investors for the Copley Square building and in 1912 purchased undeveloped property in a fashionable residential area at the boundary between Boston's Back Bay and Brookline.
Named Audubon Circle, the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed neighborhood attracted prosperous Bostonians to its handsome rowhouses. Bromley maps show Audubon Circle nearly devoid of buildings in 1890 but crowded with rowhouses by 1902. Its streets today are lined with fine examples of the Queen Anne, Romanesque Revival, Renaissance Revival, Classical Revival, Jacobean, and Beaux Arts architectural styles. Two Beacon Street rowhouses constructed in 1892 were demolished to accommodate the construction of Second Church.
Ralph Adams Cram and the Second Church In 1912, the church's standing committee announced its intent to commission an architect to design "a new building surpassed in beauty by no other church." * Only further research would reveal the committee's rationale for choosing Ralph Adams Cram, but one might speculate that a well-heeled congregation with orthodox inclinations (despite its Unitarian affiliation) might feel affinity for the famous church builder. Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), one of the most influential architects, scholars, and public figures of his time, is credited with inspiring a 20""-century revival of Gothic architecture in America and transforming church design. Son of a Unitarian minister and named in honor of Transcendentalist/Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cram was born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire.
At age 18 he moved to Boston, where he apprenticed as an architect in the office of Rotch & Tilden and proved himself a gifted draftsman. While visiting Rome (perhaps on the requisite European tour for aspiring American architects), Cram underwent a dramatic religious conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, an event that would inform his intellectual existence and his architecture for the rest of his life. At the start of his career, he determined that ecclesiastical design would be the focus of his practice. From the earliest days of his practice, Cram and his partners (Cram & Wentworth 1889-1895; Cram, Wentworth & Goodhue 1895-99; Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson 1899-1913; Cram & Ferguson 1913-57) proved themselves versatile designers with broad stylistic range, often submitting several designs in different styles for each commission.
Designs for the Seaside Club in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for example, were given eclectic, classical/medieval, and Colonial Revival treatments. The firm's entries in an 1889 competition for St. John the Divine church in New York City were Gothic and Romanesque Revival. Despite his skill in executing perfectly scaled and proportioned buildings in a variety of styles, over time Cram came to believe that the English Gothic style was "peculiarly indigenous to the western church, rather like Gregorian chant..." 5 (continued) 10 Second Church in Boston Name of Property Suffolk, MA County and State Cram discounted the Renaissance and its embrace of Classicism in favor of Gothic sources of inspiration. He was strongly influenced by English-born Henry Vaughan, a prolific proponent of the English Gothic style who in the 1880s was fast becoming the leading church architect in New England.
With Charles Goodhue, Cram designed his first church, the Episcopal Church of All Saints in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1892. The Gothic church design brought fame to the firm and is considered a significant landmark in American architectural history, serving as the "model for American parish church architecture for the first half of the 20" century." 6 According to biographer Douglass Shand-Tucci, Cram believed that the Gothic style was uniquely appropriate for Ango- Catholic Christian churches, but was unsuitable for post-Reformation churches. For these, he recommended classical forms as embodied in the Colonial Revival style? The Colonial Revival movement was an expression of American patriotism that embraced the values of the nation's founders and returned to the Classical architectural forms of the Colonial period.
The Colonial Revival in art and architecture began in the last quarter of the 19" century, spurred in part by the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, and extended well into the 20th century. For Second Church, a congregation with deep American roots, Cram and the building committee may have agreed that a Classical design was a suitable fit. A building permit was obtained in September 1913, and construction of the church by the Norcross Brothers Company was completed the following year. The church was dedicated on November 8, 1914. The choice of the Colonial Revival-style for the Unitarian Second Church may have had a basis in earlier interactions between Cram and Unitarian congregations. An article in the Boston Daily Globe on May 7, 1900, describes a controversy over church design at the First Parish Unitarian Church in Cambridge, who had contracted with Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson.
The congregation was divided, with a majority favoring a Gothic design and the minority promoting a Colonial design. Spokesmen for the minority, which included President Charles Eliot of Harvard, wanted a building resembling the Colonial Revival structures on the adjacent campus and claimed that "the gothic style cannot be consistently adopted by a Unitarian church."8 The majority prevailed and the church was constructed in the Gothic style, although stripped of much of the ornament seen in the design pictured in the Globe article. The Colonial Revival style, also referred to as Georgian Revival, was based on Classical forms and featured distinguishing features of Georgian and Federal architecture, including columns, pediments, entablatures, sidelights, fanlights, modillioned cornices, quoining, and Palladian windows.
The Second Church incorporates many of these elements in an elegant, unifed whole described by an architecture critic at the time of its dedication as "a building of intellectual type, yet designed for a rich art of worship." ' Its stone steeple was patterned after one by English Classicist Sir Christopher Wren. The unusual height of the sanctuary and the clear windows flooding the space with natural light contribute to the feeling that one is in a meetinghouse, albeit a meetinghouse with unusually ornate trim. The installation of a chancel choir, characterized by Shand-Tucci as the introduction of an Anglo-Catholic element into an American Protestant church, was said to have "scandalized President Eliot of Harvard at the dedication service."° Eliot represented the liberal Unitarian movement based at Harvard Divinity School.
The Second Church in the 20" Century Anglo-Catholic/Episcopal elements were featured in the liturgy as well as the surroundings at Second Church. Under Reverend Samuel Raymond Maxwell, who presided over construction of the new church, kneeling benches were installed, the Bible rested on the altar, and an orthodox prayer book was introduced. Choir processionals and recessionals were led by a crucifer and acolyte carrying a cross and an American flag. Maxwell and Cram collaborated on the design of a large Maltese cross, emulating the great cross at the Cathedral of Milan, which was suspended from the chancel. Reverend Maxwell attracted well-heeled, proper Bostonians from the neighborhood to the church, which acquired a reputation for elaborate religious pageants and festivals commemorating May Day and the Nativity.
(continued) 11 Second Church in Boston Name of Property Suffolk, MA County and State During the Depression period of the 1930s, the neighborhood demographic changed as residents moved to the suburbs and the population became more transient. Second Church grew more democratic and responsive to the needs of its neighbors, marking a return to the precepts of progressive Unitarianism. In the 1940s declining membership prompted the church to risk $15,000 on a powerful orator with a radio ministry capable of restoring the church's influence. The experiment with Reverend Walton Cole was successful, but the church's notoriety lasted only as long as Cole's tenure. The church gained national publicity in 1956 when a black assistant minister was proposed, and a small but vocal conservative segment of the congregation threatened to withdraw.
By 1960, the return to liberal Unitarianism was complete and the Second Church had no crucifer, cross, or Bible at the altar. In 1961, the American Unitarian and Universalist churches merged to form the Unitarian Universalist Association. The congregation and financial resources of the Second Church dwindled through the 1960s and area demographics changed again as neighboring Brookline became home to more Jewish synagogues and the Audubon Circle neighborhood became a satellite to nearby Boston University. In 1970, the Second Church, which had broken off from the First Church almost 300 years earlier, reunited with its larger "parent" to become the First and Second Church in Boston. The congregation sold the church building to the Ruggles Street Baptist Church and moved to a new building in the Back Bay that replaced the First Church, which was destroyed by fire in 1968.
The church at Berkley and Marlborough Streets incorporated the surviving Berkley Street façade of the original building in the new structure. In 2005, at the celebration of the 375th anniversary of First Church, the merged First and Second Church came full circle and returned to the name First Church. Stewardship by the Ruggles Baptist Church The Ruggles Baptist Church celebrates 40 years of ministry in the Ralph Adams Cram-designed building in 2010. The church owners have maintained complete integrity of the church exterior, but made interior modifications appropriate to conduction of the Baptist liturgy. The chancel choirs were removed, creating a more open and welcoming altar area, and the wineglass pulpit was dismantled. The three stained-glass windows at the chancel were removed.
Two panes of the "Minister's Window" picturing Reverend Increase Mather were installed at the First Church along with the Emerson bust (extant at 66 Marlborough Street in Boston); one of the other windows was sold to a commercial firm in New York City. Leonard Collins, archivist at the First Church in Boston, has stated that a wooden cross was moved to a Roxbury church but could not confirm that it was the Maltese cross designed by Cram and Reverend Maxwell." The Tiffany mosaic at the apse wall was panelled over in 1970 and sold at auction in 1983. The three large rooms in the parish hall, originally named for well-known Unitarians John Lathrop, the Mather dynasty, and Paul Revere, were renamed the Rider Room (for church pastor Dr. James T. Rider), the Ford Room (for Boston Baptist Social Union founder Daniel Sharp Ford), and Parish Hall, respectively.
The original beauty of the light-filled sanctuary with its elegant Classical details has been retained, however, and inspires the same feelings of awe and appreciation that were elicited at the church's dedication in 1914. The Ruggles Street Baptist Church was organized from two mission Sunday Schools in Roxbury in 1870 and formally incorporated into the American Baptist Church in 1878. It drew its name from its address at 159 Ruggles Street, named after a Revolutionary War hero. The church has a history of evangelism and a strong sense of civic purpose and responsibility. A 1915 announcement in the Boston Globe reported that, in addition to Sunday services, the church offered an employment bureau, a free lunch room for the unemployed, a free dispensary with three doctors in attendance, grocery and clothing departments, and free distribution of milk for babies in needy homes.!?
The church's commitment to public health and welfare led it to found the Boston Baptist Hospital in 1893, later to become New England Baptist Hospital. Daniel Sharp Ford (1822 - 1899), wealthy publisher of the Baptist weekly newspaper, The Christian Watchman and Reflector, and The Youth's Companion magazine, was a Ruggles Church member and benefactor, and founder of the Boston Baptist Social Union. He contributed generously to the union, leaving a $1.25 million bequest with a large earmark for his childhood church. Ford underwrote a European concert tour for the Ruggles Street Church male quartet, increasing their fame nationally and abroad.
(continued) 12 Second Church in Boston Name of Property Suffolk, MA County and State The church thrived in Roxbury through the 1930s, serving a heavily populated area of low- and middle-income families and welcoming more than 1,200 children a week to its Sunday School. The church building, an old meetinghouse remodelled twice to accommodate the growing congregation, was destroyed by fire in 1925. The congregation moved into the Old Swedish Baptist Church, eventually constructing a new building in 1934. Membership exceeded 1,100 in 1940 at the church's 70* anniversary, but slowly declined thereafter. The 1940s saw dramatic change in the neighborhood that Ruggles Street Baptist Church served, with families moving to the suburbs in the wake of an ethnic and economic shift.
Buildings were abandoned and demolished, crime increased, and by the late 1950s areas around the church were slated for urban renewal. Making matters worse, the government laid plans for a new highway, the proposed southeast expressway, that would run directly through the church office building. Most of the congregation was commuting into church from the suburbs by the early 1960s. Plans were made to move the church to a site that met the three requirements of the Boston Baptist convention - one that was in Boston proper, served a congregation made up of "working people," and was not near another Baptist church. With the assistance of the Boston Baptist Social Union, and the church owner-trustees, land was acquired in the Heath Street-Mission Hill area of Jamaica Plain, where New England Baptist Hospital and the Lahey Clinic planned to build a hospital.
When plans for constructing a church in Jamaica Plain stalled, and as arrangements were being made for a temporary church location, it was discovered that the Second Church was available for sale. The Ruggles Street building was sold to the St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church and the Ruggles congregation moved to Audubon Circle in 1970. For the next 40 years, the Ruggles Baptist Church congregation adapted and grew in its new surroundings. According to its current minister, Reverend Larry Showalter, the church transitioned from a "neighborhood/family" church in Roxbury to a "network" church in Boston. Today the church serves a diverse urban community that includes longstanding members who live in the suburbs, young singles and couples from nearby apartments and condiminiums, and more transient university and foreign exchange students from nearby Boston University.
A significant outreach ministry fostered formation of a new branch church in 1991 on Mission Hill in Jamaica Plain, where the Ruggles Baptist Church planned to establish itself in the late 1960s before the decision was made to acquire the Audubon Circle building. To maintain sound fiscal footing and strengthen community ties, the church enlisted "tenant" congregations of various denominations to share the sanctuary and invited numerous secular organizations to make use of rented meeting and classroom space. The stewards of the church are committed to the preservation of this distinguished building and have worked hard to assure its future. Faced with deferred maintenance issues when the building was acquired, the congregation remedied urgent conditions and conducted an exterior survey that led to a three-phased restoration carried out between 1988 and 1992.
With planning assistance from the Steeples Project through Historic Boston Incorporated, in 2008 the owners of the church commissioned a conditions assessment and master plan to guide repair and maintenance activities and address space needs. The stewards of the Ruggles Baptist Church face the future equipped with a good understanding of the building's physical needs and the tools needed to achieve their preservation goals. Endnotes 1,2, 3, 4, 9. Booth, John Nicholls. The Story of the Second Church in Boston (The Original Old North). Boston: Second Church, 1960. 5, 6, 7, 10. Shand-Tucci, Douglass. Church Building in Boston, 1720-1970, With an Introduction to Ralph Adams Cram and the Boston Gothicists. Issued by the Trustees of the Dorchester Savings Bank in observance of the Bicentennial of the United States. Concord: The Rumsford Press, 1974. 8. Boston Daily Globe.
"Favor Different Styles - Members of First Parish Church are divided in Opinion." May 7, 1900. 11. 12. Collins, Leonard. Archivist, First Church of Boston. Email communication. June 24, 2009. Boston Globe. Sunday Services Notices. March 27, 1915. (end) 13 Second Church in Boston Name of Property Suffolk, MA County and State 9.
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