Built as a Congregational Church in 1846, the congregation voted in 1960 to join the United Church of Christ. It remains a United Church of Christ today and is one of the largest UCC congregations in the state of Maine.
You may notice the absence of a spire on this church's bell tower. Two years after completion, a new and more aesthetically pleasing spire was erected on the steeple. Eighteen years later, on October 30, 1866, a strong nor'easter blew the new spire from the steeple and it was never replaced.
NB - The national Register has exchanged the nomination form numbers for this and the First Parish Church in Portland. Each at the National Register page actually refers to the other.
First Parish Church
The present building was dedicated on March 18, 1846. The builders were Messrs Coolidge Graves and Isaiah Coombs. The chairman of the building committee was Professor William Smyth. The total cost of the building was $13,101. Historically and architecturally, the First Parish Church of Brunswick ranks as the most important Gothic-Revival structure in the state if not in New England. The church was designed in 1845 by the English-born Richard UpJohn, whose Gothic Revival Gardiner Mansion of 1839 in Gardiner, Maine, had signalled the start of this country's second great eclectic style following the Greek Revival of the 1820s.
Upjohn, the first president of the American Institute of Architects, left Northeast an enormous architectural legacy of many hundreds of buildings, the best known survivor today being Trinity Church of lower Manhattan, built in 1845. Locally, the additional Upjohn churches of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Brunswick, the Central Congregational Church in Bath, and the Bowdoin College Chapel - all designed 1845-/46 - provide a nationally significant group of Upjohn architecture that continually enriches the Bath-Brunswick area.
There has always existed a close and friendly relation between the First Parish and Bowdoin College. The College gave finalcial assistance in the erection of both buildings on this site, and has certain rights in the use of the building. Until 1966 the Baccalaureate Services and the Commencement Exercises had been held either in this building or in the former one ever since the College was founded, and every Bowdoin graduate had received his degree in one or the other building except during World War II, when a few small commencements were held in the Bowdoin Chapel.
From the pulpit of this church on July 8, 1875, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow read "Montun Salutamus", the poem written for the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation from Bowdoin. Other noted personages who have spoken from the pulpit include President William Howard Taft, John Masefield, Poet Laureate of England, Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King.
Harriett Beecher Stowe's biographer, Adams, stated that she received a vision of the death scene of Uncle Tom while sitting in pew 23 during the communion of March 2, 1851.
In 1960 the First Parish Church voted to join the United Church of Christ. In 1968 extensive renovations were started on the church. The renovation projects were nearing the final states of completion at the time of this writing.
From the National Register