Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1759
Students from the North Bennet Street School repaired windows at the First Parish Church. The First Parish Church’s steps in the plan for restoring the building are as follows.
The Massachusetts Historical Commission provided a $50,000 emergency fund grant to help match the George B. Henderson Foundation’s grant of $100,000 for recent emergency repairs to the chimneys, parapets, and tower. This project finished on schedule and under the original estimates of our architects, McGinley Kalsow & Associates.
The next project will restore the original steeple: preserving and returning the two lantern sections that were removed in 2006 due to structural instability, and preserving the clock section (including the clock faces and the historic mechanism.) The original estimate for material and labor: $350,000, but there will be a significant reduction in labor costs if the church secures the North Bennet Street School involvement. The Church has received a verbal commitment from NBSS’ preservation carpentry program that their second-year students will restore the two lantern sections.
Designed in 1896 by the architectural firm Cabot, Everett and Mead, preliminary research indicates that the church building is one of the oldest ecclesiastical examples of Colonial Revival architecture. The congregation is the oldest congregation within the present-day boundaries of the city of Boston and one of the older in the United States. Gathered first in England in March 1630, it was the second congregation planted in the Massachusetts Colony, the third in New England, and through annexation became the oldest church in Boston.
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