Plymouth Church

The church of the preacher Henry Ward Beecher, one of the great centers of the fight against slavery

Local name: Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims

Collection: Brooklyn: the Heights and DUMBO · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The brick church with its portico on Orange Street · Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is Plymouth Church. It was founded in 1847 by twenty-one people who had moved here from New England. As their first pastor they called Henry Ward Beecher, brother of the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Two years later the old church burned down. The plain brick building you see was built in 1849, and the first service was held in January 1850. The hall was designed so that Beecher could be heard well. Every week about two and a half thousand people came to listen to him. Beecher spoke out against slavery. He urged people to defy the Fugitive Slave Law and to help the Underground Railroad, the secret network that led runaways north. The church came to be called Brooklyn’s “Grand Central Depot” of that railroad. Fugitives, it is said, were hidden in the basement. Beecher held “auctions” in the church, where the congregation bought enslaved people their freedom. In February 1860 he brought a little enslaved girl known as Pinky up to the pulpit. The congregation raised nine hundred dollars, and someone dropped a gold ring into the collection plate. Beecher put it on the girl’s finger. The church still keeps that ring today. That same year, 1860, Abraham Lincoln sat here in pew number eighty-nine. It was the day before his great speech on slavery in New York. A silver plaque marks the pew. Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Martin Luther King all spoke in this church.

Visiting

57 Orange Street, Brooklyn Heights; the church office is at 75 Hicks Street. The Clark Street subway station is close by. Tours are led by members of the congregation: most Sundays at 12:30 p.m. after the service, entering the sanctuary from Orange Street. On weekdays, by request through plymouthchurch.org.