Description
A Church Built of Granite: Four Centuries of Faith, Conscience, and Community in a New Hampshire Seaport
Anchored in the heart of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, A Church Built of Granite traces four centuries of faith, questioning, and community through the evolving life of South Church. It begins with a rough wooden meeting house raised by seventeenth-century English fishermen on contested Indigenous land and culminates in the solid granite church completed in 1826, where worshipers and change-seekers still gather today.
Drawing on deep and thoughtful research, the history reveals how theology, geography, politics, and personality shaped a New England congregation and the town around it. Along the way, it explores shifting ideas of land ownership, religious authority, slavery, and conscience, showing how Anglicans, Puritans, Congregationalists, Unitarians, Universalists, and Indigenous peoples all left enduring marks.
Vividly narrated, the book speaks to Unitarian Universalists, New England history lovers, and visitors alike. A Church Built of Granite is a portrait of a seaport community continually remaking itself—where belief evolved as surely as the land beneath it, and where faith was forged as much by debate as by devotion.
Janet Polasky is the author of six prize-winning histories, including most recently, Asylum Between Nations (Yale University Press, 2023), Revolutions without Borders (Yale University Press, 2016), and Reforming Urban Labor (Cornell University Press, 2010). Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the J. William Fulbright Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium.
A Presidential Professor of History Emerita at the University of New Hampshire, her teaching has been recognized by the Jean Brierley Teaching Award, the Honors Students’ Teaching Award, and the Lindberg Award for Outstanding Scholar-Teacher in the College of Liberal Arts. She received her PhD in History from Stanford University and her BA from Carleton College that honored her with a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2023.
Lifelong Unitarian Universalists, Janet Polasky grew up in the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor and her husband William Lyons in the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists. They are members of South Church, Portsmouth, NH.
It is a delight to read such a carefully researched congregational history! With compassion and honesty, Janet Polasky traces the four centuries of history that shaped the Unitarian Universalist congregation of Portsmouth’s South Church. She corrects the work of previous historians who divided the story too neatly into heroes and villains or who imagined a straight line from the founders to today’s liberal faith. This is a narrative that will inform scholars of New England religious history and inspire the people of South Church to build a still more creative future.
—Dan McKanan, Emerson Senior Lecturer, Harvard Divinity School
This lively book traces the history of Portsmouth’s South Church from its seventeenth century log fort to the sheltering granite of its nineteenth-century Greek revival meeting house, a monument to the three centuries of competition, collaboration, and eventually merging of the city’s Unitarian and Universalist congregations.
—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor, Emerita, Harvard University, and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian
These stories of courage, controversy, and conviction reflect the historic evolution of my church community finding its power in shared governance and personal responsibilities—doing good in our troubled world.
—Valerie Cunningham, Coauthor, Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African American Heritage
A Church Built of Granite is, like its namesake edifice, the obvious work of a master craftsperson. Historian Janet Polasky has seamlessly interwoven the complex history of a church community with the equally complicated and ever-evolving history of the city in which it is rooted. This broadened perspective brings clarity in understanding the history and trajectory of the congregation.
—Tom Hardiman, Former Keeper and Executive Director, Portsmouth Athenaeum
Dr. Polasky has done an extraordinary job of studying and explaining the nearly four-hundred-year evolution of South Church—physically, spiritually, and socially. A must-read for folks interested in local history, Unitarian Universalist history, and the evolution of this historic and unique congregation.
—Rev. Dr. W. Bradford Greeley, Minister Emeritus, Mainline Unitarian Church, Devon, PA.
Best church history I ever read!
