Plymouth Church was founded on May 20, 1841 in a school room in downtown Milwaukee through
the cooperation of Deacons Samuel Brown and Robert Love. The church, originally organized in
the style of the Orthodox Congregational churches of New England, secured its first pastor,
Rev. John Miter, in 1841. The congregation held meetings at Spring and Water Streets (now W.
Wisconsin and Plankinton Avenues), and within a year had grown from 24 members to 65. The
following year the congregation made plans to erect a meeting house. This building was
completed in 1844 on the corner of Spring and Second Streets. In 1845 the church was
incorporated as the First Congregational Society in the town of Milwaukee.
The congregation continued to grow throughout the 1840s and took stands on issues such as
abolition and temperance. A new building opened in 1851 on the corner of Milwaukee and
Oneida (now Wells) Streets. While the church was under construction, the First
Congregational Society began discussing an official name change. On August 21, 1850 the
society voted to change its name to Plymouth Church.
By 1864, Plymouth Church had become the largest congregation in the Wisconsin Convention
with 456 members. From 1863 to 1864 the church's combined contributions to other churches,
agencies, and institutions totaled over $23,000. Over the next several years Plymouth Church
contributed over half the amount raised by Wisconsin churches to endow a professorship at
the Chicago Theological Seminary.
Rev. Judson Titsworth and other congregation members were suggesting a move to Milwaukee's
developing upper East Side by the turn of the century. At the 1910 annual meeting the
congregation authorized the church board to sell the building at Oneida and Van Buren, which
they had built 23 years earlier, and purchased land for a new church on the southeast corner
of Hackett Avenue and Concord (now Hampshire) Street on Milwaukee's East Side. During 1913
the congregation met in a temporary "barracks" while a new building was constructed. On
Easter Sunday of 1914, the congregation celebrated its first worship service in the new
building and continues to worship there today.
In 1963, Plymouth Church voted to become part of the United Church of Christ, a
denomination which was formed in 1957 with the merger of Congregational Christian Churches
and the Evangelical and Reformed Church.
Plymouth Church continued to support a politically and socially active congregation
throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The congregation
has been active in controversial issues facing religious institutions, from the abolition of
slavery in the 1850s to gay and lesbian issues in the 1980s and living with AIDS in the
1990s.
In the 1980s, the congregation and pastors became active in preserving church history,
resulting in a series of oral history interviews capturing the recollections of long-time
church members and a book researched and written by Pastor Paul Flucke entitled Plymouth: A Church and Its World.
