The Rev. James Dana House was built around 1760. Rev. Dana was Pastor of Wallingford’s First Congregational Church during the period of the Revolutionary War. When Rev. Dana arrived from Cambridge, MA to become the church’s minister in 1758, he was soon at the center of what would be called the “Wallingford Controversy.” Dana was supported by those called “Old Lights,” who opposed the “New Light” evangelical preachers of the Great Awakening. As explained by Charles Henry Stanley Davis, in his History of Wallingford (1870), “Dr. Dana was understood to be of the then liberal school of Boston and that region, and of that party which had opposed the revival of religion; his settlement in so large and important a church, would be a triumph of that party, which had already become a minority in the county and in the colony; and therefore the new light men were determined by all means to prevent the ordination, and when the thing was done to undo it if possible.”
According to Gideon Hiram Hollister’s History of Connecticut, Vol. 1 (1858), Dana was settled as minister in Wallingford, “in opposition to a large proportion of the members of the society. It was contended by his opponents that he was not orthodox in sentiment; that he had evaded the enquiries of the committee as to his views on important doctrinal points, and finally replied impertinently; and, after his alleged ordination, it was claimed that the ordination was not valid.”
The Congregational consociations of New Haven and southern Hartford counties joined to declare a sentence of non-Communion against Dana and the Wallingford church. As George Punchard wrote, in his History of Congregationalism, Vol. 5 (1881), the controversy, “resulted in a division of the church, and the formation of a new one by the disaffected brethren, some of whom were among the most influential men of the town. From Wallingford the controversy spread all over the colony, and continued for years, alienating brethren and dividing churches.” Some years later, in 1772, a kind of amnesty was eventually declared for Dana and his church and some of his old opponents were reconciled with him. An example of one of Rev. Dana’s sermons is one he gave on The African Slave Trade in 1791. Dana left Wallingford in 1789 and lived in New Haven until his death in 1812.