Page 38 - Wallingford Magazine Issue 53 Early Spring 2025

by Steve Knight
The First Congregational Church of Wallingford

ates 350 Year
s
Celebrates 350 Years
Celebr

1675-2025

Author’s Note: 2025 is the 350th anniversary of the First Congregational Church of Wallingford. As a member, I volun-
teered to write a history of the church as part of the celebration. As I began my research in preparation for writing, I
quickly realized three things: 1) There is no way to begin a history of the church in Wallingford without quickly reviewing
a history of early New England and, more specifically, a history of the New Haven and Connecticut colonies. 2) The early
history of these areas that we are taught in school is sketchy at least and inadequate at best if you are to understand
Wallingford’s founding. 3) Wallingford’s founding and its history until the beginning of the 1800s is thickly intertwined
with that of the First Congregational Church of Wallingford.

Early Colonial History: We have all been “The peak years of the Great Migra-
taught that a group of Puritans known tion lasted just over ten years — from
also as Pilgrims landed in Plymouth in 1629 to 1640, years when the Puritan
1620. These were also referred to as crisis in England reached its height. In
Separatists, because their solution to 1629, King Charles I dissolved Parlia-
dealing with their disagreements with ment, thus preventing Puritan leaders
the Church of England was to leave the from working within the system to ef-
church. On the other hand, most other fect change and leaving them vulnera-
Puritans sought to reform, or “purify” ble to persecution. The Massachusetts
the Church of England. However, in the Bay Colony, chartered in the same year
1620s, “leaders of the English state and by a group of moderate Puritans, repre-
church grew increasingly unsympathet- sented both a refuge and an opportu-
ic to Puritan demands. They insisted nity for Puritans to establish a ‘Zion in
that the Puritans conform to religious the wilderness.’ During the ten years
practices that they abhorred, removing that followed, over twenty thousand
their ministers from office and threat- men, women, and children left England
ening them with ‘extirpation from the to settle permanently in the Massachu-
earth’ if they did not fall in line.” (https:// setts Bay Colony.” (https://www.americanances-
www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel01.html). Thus tors.org/new-englands-great-migration)
began what is referred to as the Great
Migration. Two of the many Puritan ministers that
fled were Thomas Hooker and John Dav-

38 Wallingford Magazine - Early Spring 2025