Browse the Second Church records in Marblehead, Massachusetts

In 1714 the congregation of the First Parish Church of Marblehead sought a new minister to assist the aging Reverend Samuel Cheever. A conflict soon arose regarding two of the new candidates. The majority of the congregants voted to install Rev. John Barnard, but a vocal minority supported the other candidate, Rev. Edward Holyoke. Rev. Holyoke's supporters eventually broke off to form the Second Church of Marblehead.

A meetinghouse was erected on New Meetinghouse Lane (later renamed Mugford Street) in 1716. Rev. Edward Holyoke ministered to Second Church until 1737 when he became President of Harvard College. In the 1830s, the congregation adopted the new Unitarian thinking and became the Second Congregational Church (Unitarian). The meeting house was replaced in 1831 with a much larger structure, and again in 1911 due to fire damage, but its location has remained the same since the church's foundation. In the 1960s, with the merger of the two liberal religious organizations, it became the Unitarian Universalist Church of Marblehead. The digital collections consist of an original petition calling for the expulsion of Rev. Edward Holyoke's supporters from the First Church, two bound volumes of the Second Church's records, and a notebook kept by Rev. Samuel Dana, minister of Groton, Mass.

Materials in this collection have been digitized in partnership with the Marblehead Museum and have been made available through our New England's Hidden Histories project.