Chapter 23: Shawmut Church

Shawmut Church, in Boston, stands at the corner of Tremont and Brookline Streets. Its history is one of unique interest. Its very name connects the old and new world together. A Saxon monk, named Botolph, after completing his Christian studies in Germany, founded, A. D. 654, a monastery in Lincolnshire, on the Witham, near the sea, and made it a centre of holy light and knowledge. He was the friend of sailors and boat-folk. The houses which grew up around the monastery became Botolph’s Town, or Boston. “Botolph” is itself but another form of boat-help, and the famous tower of this English parish church, finer than many cathedrals, is crowned by an octagon lantern, nearly three hundred feet above the ground. It serves as a beacon-light, being visible forty miles distant, and, as of old, is the boat-help of Saint Botolph’s Town. This ecclesiastical lighthouse is familiarly called “Boston Stump,” and overlooks Lincolnshire, the cradle of Massachusetts history. At Scrooby, a few miles to the west, lived and worshipped the Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers. From this shire, also, came the English people who settled at Shawmut on the 17th of September, 1630.

The Indian name, Shawmut, was that of the “place near the neck,” probably the present Haymarket Square. The three-hilled peninsula called Tremont, or Boston, by the white settlers, was connected with the main land at Roxbury by a long, narrow neck or causeway. The future “South End” was then under the waves. After about two centuries of use as a wagon road, this narrow strip between Boston and Roxbury—so narrow that, at high tide, boys were able to leap from the foam of the South Bay to the spray of the waters of the Charles River—was widened. Suffolk Street, which was one of the first highways west of Washington Street to be made into hard ground, was named Shawmut Avenue. About the middle of the nineteenth century, much land was reclaimed from the salt mud and marshes and made ready for the pile-driver, mason, and builder. Two splendid districts, the first called the “South End,” and the second the “Back Bay,” were created. Where, in the Revolutionary War, British frigates lay at anchor, are now Beacon Street and Commonwealth and Massachusetts Avenues. Where the redcoats stepped into their boats for disembarkation at the foot of Bunker Hill, stretch the lovely Public Gardens. The streets running east and west in the new districts, beginning with Dover and ending with Lenox, are named after towns in the Bay State. About midway among these, as to order and distance, are Brookline and Canton Streets.

On a chance space of hard soil around Canton and Dedham Streets, in this marshy region, a suburban village of frame houses had gathered, and here a Sunday school was started as early as 1836. In January, 1842, a weekly prayer-meeting began at the house of Mr. Samuel C. Wilkins. On November 20, 1845, a church was formed, with fifty members. In the newly filled up land, the pile-driver was already busy in planting forests of full-grown trees head downward. All around were rising blocks of elegant houses, with promise of imposing civic and ecclesiastical edifices of various kinds. In the wider streets were gardens, parks, or ample strips of flower-beds. This was the land of promise, and into it pressed married couples by the hundreds, creating lovely homes, rearing families, and making this the choicest part of the young city. For, though “Boston town” is as old as Mother Goose’s rhymes, the municipality of Boston was, in 1852, but thirty years old. The congregation of Christian people which, on April 14, 1849, took the name, as parish, of The Shawmut Congregational Society, and, as a church, one month later, the name of the Shawmut Congregational Church, occupied as a meeting-house first a hall, then a frame building, and finally a handsome edifice of brick, which was dedicated on the 18th of November, 1852. This building is now occupied by the Every Day Church, of the Universalist denomination. The tide of prosperity kept steadily rising. The throng of worshippers increased, until, in the very midst of the great Civil War, it was necessary to have more room. The present grand edifice on Tremont Street was erected and dedicated February 11, 1864; the Rev. Edwin Bonaparte Webb, who had been called from Augusta, Maine, being the popular and successful pastor.

Boston was not then noted, as she certainly is now, for grandeur or loveliness in church edifices. Neither excellence nor taste in ecclesiastical architecture was, before the war, a striking trait of the city or the people. To-day her church spires and towers are not only numerous, but are famed for their variety and beauty.