First Parish in Concord was founded in 1636 by the first English settlers. Its first minister was English Puritan Peter Bulkeley. Beginning in the 1700s, the First Parish adopted a more liberal theology, and today belongs to the Unitarian Universalist Association. The present meetinghouse was completed in 1901, replacing an earlier meetinghouse that was destroyed by fire. The original meetinghouse stood across Lexington Road in what is now called the Old Hill Burial Ground.

Rev. Ezra Ripley baptized Henry David Thoreau here in 1817. In 1826, Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia, was among nine parishioners who left the First Parish to form a more orthodox congregation, but she eventually returned. Thoreau’s own beliefs were influenced by the Transcendentalist ideas of his friend and neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thoreau officially resigned from the First Parish in 1841.

In 1844, Emerson addressed a meeting in Concord celebrating the 10th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. Thoreau asked the First Parish sexton to ring the church bell to announce the meeting, but he refused, so Thoreau himself rang the bell, which is now preserved with a commemorative plaque on the church lawn.

Following John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in 1859, Thoreau gave his stirring address, “A Plea for Captain John Brown” at the First Parish. Less than three years later, after Thoreau’s death from tuberculosis at age 44, his funeral was held at the First Parish, attended by Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and many others.

The First Parish Meetinghouse is still in use as a house of worship. For more information, see First Parish’s website.