Event Details
Sunday, May 3
South Church Invites Public to Birthday Celebration
PORTSMOUTH, NH –The public is invited to South Church Sunday, May 3, 4 to 5:30 pm, to celebrate the iconic building’s bicentennial.
The granite landmark at 292 State Street, with its clear, arching windows and soaring portico columns, opened its doors in 1826, replacing a series of wooden churches dating back to 1636. It was described at the time as “one of the most beautiful and impressive temples of worship in the land,” according to Janet Polasky, author of a South Church history, due to be published later this year.
The May 3 presentations include Peter Michaud, an architectural historian, and Eric Lipsitt, a former South Church trustee, discussing the building’s historical significance; Polasky, UNH professor of history emerita, and Angela Matthews, co-founder and tour leader of the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire, on the overall history of South Church; and church co-leaders, the Rev. Ellen Quaadgras and Kirsten Hunter on current community involvement.
A launch of Polasky’s book, “A Church Built of Granite: Four Centuries of Faith, Conscience, and Community in a New Hampshire Seaport,” is scheduled for September and a concert in October will focus on 200 years of music.
South Church was a Congregationalist, not a Unitarian-Universalist, church in 1826. It would not become officially Unitarian until 1865; and it would not join with Portsmouth’s Universalist congregation until 1945, 16 years before the two denominations merged nationally.
Initially, there was only one Congregational church in Portsmouth, occupying a 1637 log sanctuary near the South Mill Pond. But in 1713 some members decided to build North Church in the evolving town center. Others in the congregation, not wanting to walk that far on Sundays, stayed where they were and became South Church.
Building the Stone Church, as it initially was called, was ambitious, especially since membership at the time seemed to increase only when there was, literally, an earthquake, according to church records. But in 1824, the decaying, cramped wooden sanctuary led to construction of South Church.
“Schooners sailed into the harbor weekly loaded with granite from Rockport, Massachusetts,” Polasky said. “A glass chandelier arrived from Cambridge and the iron fence came from England. The women of the church raised funds to purchase an organ, a rarity in churches of the time.”
In his opening sermon in the new church, the Rev. Nathan Parker, minister of South Church for 25 years, called on the congregation to direct its “thoughts to the future. This house is built for perpetuity… Its elements are as indestructible as the earth on which it rests.”