There have been five meeting-houses of Middletown’s First Church of Christ Congregational. The church was organized in 1668 and the first meeting house had been built even earlier, in the 1650s, with a gallery added in the 1660s. The second was built in 1679. Both of these simple log structures, defended by palisades, stood on Main Street, but the third meeting house was built in 1715 on High Street. As Azel Washburn Hazen explains in A Brief History of the First Church of Christ in Middletown, Connecticut for Two Centuries and a Half, 1668-1918 (1920),
This was a strange location, far from the centre of the population, and still farther from the settlement of the Upper Houses. But the site was chosen by lot, as the people could not otherwise agree where It should stand. Though the place was one where no person desired the house to be reared, yet such was their reverence for the lot, as indicating the will of God, they held sacredly and amicably to its decision. The edifice was sixty feet long and forty feet wide, two stories in height, with spacious galleries. No picture of it has come down to us, yet tradition reports it to have been an ungainly structure. After twenty-five years it was outgrown, and an addition eighteen feet in width was stretched along the westerly side of it.
Hazen writes of the fourth building,
In 1799 occurred a memorable event in the life of the Church viz. the completion of its fourth house of worship, on Main Street. It caused sincere rejoicing in the hearts of the people to take leave of the unsightly, badly situated structure near the head of Church Street, and to enter the spacious, and for its time, elegant, edifice at the very heart of the city.
By 1870, this building was out of repair. The nearby South South Congregational Church had built a new meeting house in 1867 and the First Church decided to erect a new edifice as well. The current brownstone-fronted church, built in 1871-1872 on Court Street, was designed by C.C. Nicholas of Albany. The church‘s spire, damaged in the hurricane of 1938, was removed and has never been replaced.
