Excerpt from Old Families of the First Parish

Before 1844, when this church was moved and turned half around to face the east, the pews were square with high partitions; the high pulpit was reached by long, straight stairs.

At that time the present pulpit and pews were placed here, taken from a church in Boston.

Some have questioned whether this pulpit was the one from which Ralph Waldo Emerson preached. I wrote to his daughter, Miss Ellen Emerson, and this is her reply: My father's church was the Second Church. Henry Ware, Jr., was the minister before my father, and Chandler Robbins was his suc cessor. I think the meeting-house was taken downwhen the society built a new one on Bedford Street. From there they moved to Boylston Street, where the Second Church is now, with Mr. Van Ness as its minister. Your pulpit certainly was Henry Ware's, and in it my father was ordained.

The desk in the Sunday-school room below has been occupied by many eminent men. It was formerly the pulpit in the old Orthodox Congregational church in Woburn. When the society moved into their new church home, the building was sold to the Unitarians. I was a girl at school in Woburn during the palmy days of the Lyceum. Lyceum Hall was not then built, and in the vestry of the Congregational church those who attended the Lyceum assembled, as it had the largest seating capacity of any place, except the church room above.

But when the great lights came, - and they were always coming then, as now, it was often expedient to adjourn to the church room above. When Mr. Barnes was preaching at the Woburn Unitarian Church, this pulpit was received by us at the time we made the vestry, in the early seventies, I think. From that pulpit I have heard speak, A. L. Stone, a former minister of Park Street Church, gifted John Pierpont, two ministers that our soldiers, in the Civil War, loved so well, Thomas Starr King, Anson Burlingame.

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