First Baptist Church

The First Baptist Church in America is the oldest Baptist congregation in the United States. The church was founded in 1638 by Roger Williams and for years services were held in homes or outdoors. The pastors who followed Williams mark our streets today: Williams, Brown, Dexter, Olney, Wickenden, Manning, Gano. In 1700 minister Pardon Tillinghast created a small building on land he owned on North Main Street, the site of the current historic building. Brown University’s founding was sparked by the church, and Brown’s first president, James Manning, was also a church minister. The building we know today, called the Meeting House, was built in 1774-75 and was the largest building in New England at the time. It was built to seat 1200 people, one third of Providence’s population, and was designed in part to hold Brown’s commencement exercises. Learn more about the church and its role in the development of Providence on the First Baptist web site. 

Left: Unknown artist, Frank Leslie's Sunday magazine, Frank Leslie's Publishing House., 1877, pg. 76. Right: Filetime, 2020.