History:
Founded in 1766 as a Presbyterian communion by the Scotch-Irish settlers of the newly formed town of Boothbay, the church’s first pastor was a young, dynamic, Scottish-born evangelist, John Murray, who served the parish until 1779. Several years of Murray’s powerful preaching and “harvests” of converted souls made the Boothbay Church the center of Presbyterianism in New England. The British in 1777 fixed a price on Murray’s head forcing him to flee Boothbay for a pulpit in safer Newburyport, Massachusetts. Adrift for two decades after Murray’s departure, and almost alone as Presbyterians in New England, the Boothbay parishioners covenanted as Congregationalists in 1798. By 1845, a sizeable number of the communicants who increasingly resided in the harbor rather than the Town of Boothbay, withdrew from the old center meeting house to build a new church atop the hill overlooking Boothbay Harbor. On August 2, 1848 these people, many of them descendants of the original covenanters, founded the present Congregational Church of Boothbay Harbor, called then the Second Congregational or South Parish Church. They rebuilt the church with its present spire in 1881. However, in the 20th century the historic white sanctuary with it soaring spire sat hazardously close to busy Townsend Avenue. In 1990 the congregation, now a part of the United Church of Christ, elected to move the church back from the road 35ft, add a new hall and activities rooms and give the church setting an attractive grassy, tree-lined frontage. The gleaming neo-gothic meeting house with its landmark steeple, still sits there today welcoming all to Boothbay Harbor Maine