First Baptist

The white steeple on North Main Street rises to one hundred eighty-five feet, and on a clear day it orients the whole city's skyline the way a ship's mast orients a harbor. The building went up in seventeen seventy-four and seventeen seventy-five, designed by Joseph Brown, an astronomer, not a trained architect, who worked from an English pattern book published in seventeen twenty-eight by James Gibbs. Brown copied a steeple design that Gibbs had proposed for St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London but never built. So Providence got a steeple that London never did.

The congregation the building houses is older than the building by a hundred and thirty-six years. Roger Williams established it in sixteen thirty-eight, two years after founding the settlement itself. It is the oldest Baptist congregation in the United States. Williams's founding conviction was the one that made this place possible at all: you could not coerce belief. Conscience was a private matter between a person and God, and no civil government had standing to intervene.

The church became the first Baptist congregation to build a steeple and install a bell, both of which were architectural gestures associated with established churches, a deliberate statement that dissenters could have civic presence. Brown University held its commencements here for years, the first class having graduated in seventeen sixty-nine. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty. Stand in front of it and you are standing at the oldest continuous Protestant congregation in New England.