Congregational Church:

The act by which the town of Southborough was incorporated stipulated that within eighteen months the inhabitants should “erect and finish a suitable house for the public worship of God, and procure and settle a learned, orthodox minister of good conversation, and make provision for his comfortable and honorable support”. The first minister was chosen on March 16, 1730, when Reverend Nathan Stone was elected “to fulfill the sacred work of the ministry [..] by a joint and full vote [in which] every man present made choice of him for their minister”. Lengthy negotiations resulted in his being granted £200 to settle in the town; £100 as a yearly salary with an increase to £110 in four years and to £120 in six; “thirty cord of good fier wood yearly delivered at the place of his abode during his natural life [sic]”, and a “good deed” to twenty acres promised to the first settled minister by the Town of Marlborough, along with another deed of five acres promised to him by William Johnson. Copies of receipts given by Reverend Stone to the town for his yearly salary for the years 1733 to 1771 are to be found through volume one of town records, and there are several loose receipts in his own handwriting. An indication of the excessive fluctuation of monetary values may be seen in the fact that for the year 1775/1776 the town granted £66, 13 shillings and 4 pence, whereas in 1780, the year prior to his death he was voted £3,500. Reverend Nathan Stone died on May 31, 1781 after a pastorate of fifty years, and he, his wife Judith, and three children, Reliance, Hannah and Nathaniel lie at the upper edge of the old burying ground, less than fifty feet from the present Congregational Church.

A period of ten years elapsed following the death of Rev. Stone during which the town was without a settled minister. Surviving correspondence between the town and prospective candidates document lengthy contractual and salary disputes; the town being unwilling to offer what ministers felt was reasonable in order to come and settle with them.

In November 1783, a citizens petition called for Mr. William Plumb to settle as preacher in Southborough after the death of Rev. Stone, but an agreement could not be made for him to settle with the town and procure residence in Southborough.

In June 1786, the town voted to ask Rev. Solomon Aiken, a recent graduate of Dartmouth Ministry School, to settle as their pastor. Aiken rejected the town’s request, and wrote: “seeing no propriety or scripture warrant for your present made and manner of admitting persons to the seals of the covenant, [I] think it not my duty to practice in that way”.

In January 1788, the inhabitants requested that Rev. Abishai Colton settled with them, and he initially accepted; requesting only a modest amount of land adjacent to the meeting house where he could take up residence, and a salary of seventy-five pounds and twenty cords of wood per year. He also requested two or three sabbaths off a year without preaching or supplying the pulpit so that he could visit his parents and friends who lived a considerable distance away. Despite the requested salary being only a tiny fraction of what they had paid to the late Rev. Stone, the inhabitants found his demands to be too rich, causing Colton to withdraw his offer, writing:
“I gave my answer in the affirmative provided you would make some little alterations in your proposals, but as you have not on the whole made those alterations which I requested in my answer, and as there has great uneasiness in the town respecting the alterations requested, I cannot think it will me for my peace and happiness or for the good of the town to tarry. Therefore I beg leave to withdraw my answer to give it in the negative. I would further recommend it to the town to consider that if they would ever have a candidate for the Gospel Ministry settled among them, it is for their own character to be tender of the character of the candidates that come among you, and not raise false and scurrilous reports concerning any of them - for with you as well as with them a good name is rather to be chosen than silver”.

In October 1789, the town received yet another devastatingly candid rejection from Rev. Nathan Howe; a 1786 graduate of the ministry school at Harvard College. Mr. Howe thanked the town for the favorable opinion they had formed of him, but rejected their offer, writing:
“Suffer me to inform you that I have asked the direction of God and received the advice of men, and after the most mature deliberation, [...] concluded to answer in the negative. The reasons for my answering you in this way are so numerous and various that you will please to excuse me from descending to particulars - but let me assure you that when taken together, they appear to me to be quite sufficient, some of which do not regard the town nor its proceeding, and others that have a considerable influence on my mind are such as would not be well for me to speak; nor you to hear, since to relate them would give me pain and afford you no pleasure”.
Within a few months of denying the town of Southborough’s request to have him settle as minister, Howe was ordained as pastor in the adjacent town of Hopkinton which was quick to agree to his terms.

Finally, on March 7, 1791, the town settled Rev. Samuel Sumner as minister. His tenure however was cut short in 1797 when he was forced to resign amidst accusations that he had refused to meet when repeatedly desired, and altered the church’s covenant without consent.

Two years later, a locally-born pastor, and the town's first college graduate, the Rev. Jeroboam Parker was installed. In exchange for his services the town agreed to pay five-hundred dollars for a settlement and eighty pounds salary yearly; the settlement to be paid fifty pounds a year without interest. In 1811, Parker confronted the town about his meager salary, writing:
“Unhappy experience has taught me that the sum which I annually receive as a compensation for my services is not now sufficient to procure the necessities of life, much less to enable me to discharge the duties of my office without embarrassment. Under these circumstances can I expect to be able to meet the necessary expenses of my family and discharge without disposing of my [...] obligations and demands held against me, which the present month amounted to one-thousand dollars more than what is due to me on my obligations. After having spent about twelve years in the prime of my life in this place under these difficult circumstances, after having submitted to the experiment whether I could live upon a sum which experience has taught me is little more than one half of what would be necessary to support the character and to discharge the duties of my station, and without the prospect of providing for the future exigences of my family”.
Not wanting to lose another minister, the town raised his annual salary to $366.67 from 1813 until the “ministerial grant of 1831” for $380, the last ministerial tax voted by the town, and it was approved only by the close margin of three votes (27-24).

During Parker’s pastorate the old meetinghouse was replaced with the present building. Parker was a radical in his day, and through two decades of preaching, perhaps calling upon his Harvard training, he gradually shifted the theology of the town church from its Calvinist roots to Unitarianism. Inevitably, there was a rift among the congregation, which lead to “extraordinary applications for a dismissal from the church”, and in 1823 a powerful minority, including such church and community leaders as Josiah and Webster Johnson, John Chamberlain, and Peter Fay, began meeting in homes to study the bible and continue to follow the more conservative, orthodox teachings of the old Calvinist church. At the same time, another small but substantial portion of the congregation withdrew to form the First Baptist Society.

The orthodox Congregationalists who remained loyal to traditional teachings formed their own religious organization, the Pilgrim Evangelical Society, in February, 1831 with thirteen initial members. The congregation grew rapidly, and had amassed over 100 parishioners by 1833 when a church was erected northeast of the intersection of Main Street and Cordaville Road, where Peters Park is located today. Disheartened by the withdrawal of so many of his flock, the aging Rev. Jeroboam Parker resigned from the First Church in 1832.

Although the establishment clause of the First Amendment clearly prohibits the creation of a national church, when the amendment was ratified in 1791 it did not eliminate established churches in those states where they still existed, as it would have encountered staunch opposition in those states if it had sought to do so. Separation of church and state did not occur in Massachusetts until 1833, and the Commonwealth was the last of the original 13 states to officially disestablish its churches. After that time it continued to require various religious tests, oaths, and otherwise aid Protestant religion, but ministers across the state ceased to be employees of their respective towns. Religious societies henceforth operated as bodies independent of the government, and taxation was no longer available for their support. All three Southborough congregations struggled with supporting their ministers and maintaining their buildings in those early years. With both town tax support removed and their numbers severely diminished, however, it was the older Unitarian society, reorganized as the First Church of Southborough, which suffered the most during the transition.

(Inventory of City and Town Archives of Massachusetts: Southborough, 1942, Secretary of the Commonwealth, Massachusetts Historical Records Survey files 1936-1942, SC1/167X, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston, MA.)

Rev. Nathan Stone:

“Reverend Nathan Stone (1708-1781) led the church in Southborough, Massachusetts, beginning in 1730. A religious conservative, like his father Nathanael Stone of Harwich, Massachusetts, he also served as secretary to the powerful "Marlborough Association" of local ministers.

The Reverend Nathan Stone was born in Harwich, Massachusetts, on February 18, 1708 to Nathanael (1667-1755) and Reliance [Hinkley] Stone (d.1759). Nathan Stone's paternal grandfather, Simon Stone, was the first of his family to come to America from England -- sometime between 1653 and 1667 -- and his son Nathanael (sometimes spelled Nathaniel) was the first minister of Harwich. Nathan's maternal grandfather was Thomas Hinkley, governor of the Plymouth colony from 1680 to 1692. Nathan attended Harvard College, leaving in 1726 after participating in a student riot, but returned to continue his studies in 1729. In 1730, Nathan was ordained reverend for the newly created town of Southborough, Massachusetts, and soon became an influential and highly respected member of the community.

He was elected secretary to the "Marlborough Association," a post he held for many years. This association comprised a collection of ministries from local towns which met for the purposes of mutual assistance, and to guide the spiritual direction of the area's inhabitants. In an age when there was still no clear-cut division between Church and State, this body wielded a great deal of power. Nathan also contributed to Ezra Stiles' book, The Ecclesiastical History of British North America, with an account of the history of Southborough. On October 21, 1734, Nathan married Judith Fox, daughter of Reverend Jabez Fox of Woburn. She died in childbirth, however, in February 1748, leaving him a widower with several children. Three years later he married again, this time to Mary Thacher, daughter of Middleborough Reverend Peter Thacher.

Nathan Stone, like his father, was religiously conservative, holding fast to traditional Puritan ideals, and was firmly opposed to the radical revivalism of the Great Awakening that was occurring around him in the late 1730s and early 1740s. Though he managed to keep the majority of his congregation from succumbing to these influences, he could not stem the tide of social and religious "laxness" that began to overtake the colonies in the years before the American Revolution. By the 1760s, the tightly-knit religious community of his youth was rapidly coming apart, the Puritan ethics he so revered were disappearing, and New England colonists were quickly becoming radicalized in their opposition to the Crown. Nathan Stone was horrified by the Boston Tea Party, and watched with disapproval as Southborough and other local communities began to organize their own militias. Indeed, by the 1770s, Nathan Stone had become so frustrated with his congregation's reactionary tendencies towards Britain that he would openly berate them from the pulpit, even naming those individuals whose activities did not meet his strict ethical standards.

As the inevitability of open conflict became apparent, Stone continued to urge reconciliation and caution to his parishioners. Yet, by the late 1770s his attitude had changed, and he came to accept the war for independence as a just one. Nathan Stone died on May 31, 1781, and several weeks later the town held a day of prayer and fasting in his honor.”

(Biography Courtesy of University of Delaware Library and Special Collections)