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1. How Our Church Began
The Town of Needham and the First Church had their beginning at the same time. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was a theocracy and no town could be incorporated without the promise to support a licensed minister of religion.
The forty-five families struggling to make a living farming the poor soil in the western part of Dedham north of the Charles River became eager to have a church more conveniently located to their homes. Especially in the winter it was hard for them to travel the five to ten miles, crossing a river to attend meetings and services. Dedham granted tax relief in 1710 if they would suppport a minister of their own. In May of 1710, forty farmers petitioned Colonial Governor James Dudley, deputy for Queen Anne, England’s last Stuart monarch, to start a new town of their own. The charter was finally granted on November 6, 1711 (old time—Julian calendar) or November 17 (new time, Gregorian calendar.) The town then included land which is now the Town of Wellesley.
Religious meetings were held in people’s homes until 1712, when the first edifice
was begun at town expense on the corner of Nehoiden St. and Central Ave., then
the center of the town. The building was not completely finished until 1717.
Various supply preachers filled the pulpit and some 20 candidates were
considered for the ministry, but refused to settle for a salary of 70 pounds and
firewood. Famous ministers Increase and Cotton Mather were among the
professionals consulted in the search.
Finally, in 1720, Rev. Jonathan Townsend, 22 years old and a graduate of Harvard, agreed to be the minister for 80 pounds, firewood and a settlement fee. The church could then officially be established, with the signing of the Church Covenant by twenty men on March 20, 1720, and a few days later, by nineteen women. Townsend served in Needham for the rest of his life, for most of that time being the only college educated person in the community. The house he built with money from his wife, Mary Sugars, is still standing, set back from the street at 980 Central Avenue. It now has a mansard roof.
The town supported the meetinghouse and paid the minister’s salary until 1834. Townsend’s salary,
which never exceeded 90 pounds, was often in arrears. The minister taught a grammar school, cut
wood from the ministerial woodlot and from time to time
preached elsewhere to earn money. Townsend kept a meticulous
diary with records of the church. During his ministry there were
1630 baptisms, 238 persons joining the church and 219
marriages. The diary is still extant today with tiny writing in ink
now brown with age. In parts there is a second layer of writing
superimposed perpendicularly over the first, to conserve paper.
One of the most fascinating entries tells of Townsend’s admonishing his congregation to be more welcoming of French refugees from Acadia in what is now Nova Scotia, considering that their own recent forebears had been refugees from England. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow later dramatized the plight of the Acadians in his long narrative poem, “Evangeline.”
Townsend died on September 30, 1762, age 65, in the forty-third year of his ministry. He was buried in the graveyard near the church on Nehoiden Street. George Kuhn Clarke, who much later resided in the Townsend house, said in his “History of Needham,” written in 1911, “Mr. Townsend was a serious, dignified minister of the old school, but had tact, and held the affections of the people to the end.”
First In A Series On The History Of First Parish
Researched And Written By Ruth Sutro
October 16, 2005