First Congregational Church - Detroit, MI
Posted by: 
GT.US
N 42° 21.295 W 083° 03.775
17T E 330103 N 4691244
The First Congregational Church is located at 33 E. Forest (on the corner of Forest and Woodward Avenue) in Detroit, Michigan.
Waymark Code: WM7ZXG
Location: Michigan, United States
Date Posted: 12/31/2009
Views: 11
The Detroit 1701 website at (
visit link) tells us:
"Henry Hobson Richardson graduated from Harvard in 1859 and then went to Paris to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He returned to the United States in 1865 and quickly became the most prominent architect of this era. His first distinctive and memorable creations were several Boston-area churches he designed. Rather than imitating the Second Empire study of architecture that was then emerging in Paris, he found inspiration in the Romanesque architecture of southern France and Italy. He gradually moved toward his own style of architecture for churches and other large buildings. He made use of rough hewn surfaces such as the stones that make up Detroit’s First Congregational Church. Indeed, the use of rough hewn stone in large buildings constructed in this age gives them a Richardsonesque style. He also used geographic compositions extensively and favored rounded arches, including rounded windows. Note the many arches at the front of this church along with the linear supporting columns.
Henry Hobson Richardson did not design this church. Indeed, the only structure in Detroit that can be confirmed as designed by him is the Bagley Memorial Fountain. John Layman Faxon, a Boston contemporary of Henry Hobson Richardson, designed First Congregational. Although Faxon traveled in Europe to study architecture before executing his Detroit commission, he apparently borrowed heavily from one of the churches that gave Richardson his reputation, Trinity Church in Boston. Faxon used warm red limestone for this church and, in the Richardson style, it is rough hewn. The Woodward façade features a raised five-bay loggia. Above the entry way, you see a parapeted front gable. Above that is a two tiered arcade of rounded windows with much flowery tracery framed by a very substantial rounded arch. Faxon also added a 120-foot campanile, with its Richardsonesque arrangement of geometric patterns and many narrow arcades. This is topped by an 8-foot copper figure of the Archangel Uriel. I suspect there are very few statues of the Archangel Uriel anywhere in the world. W. Hawkins Ferry, Detroit’s leading architectural historian, saw both Romanesque and Byzantine elements in the design of this church. Attached to First Congregation, is an activities center known as the Angel’s Wing Community House. Albert Kahn designed this building which as opened in 1925.
In 1801, a group of Congregationalists in Connecticut sent David and Alice Bacon to establish a Congregational church in the small French-speaking village of Detroit that had been under US rule for less than half a decade. This missionary effort failed. Indeed, I think the first establishment of a Protestant church awaited Father Gabriel Richard’s recruitment of the Reverend Montieth from Princeton Seminary in about 1817. The Congregationalists organized their first Detroit church on Christmas day in 1844. They occupied two wooden churches near the riverfront before moving into the massive structure that you see. The basement of their second church, located at the corner of Fort and Wayne, was a hiding place for fugitive slaves before they crossed the Detroit River to freedom in Canada."