Abyssinian Church, Portland, ca. 1890
Item 6277 info
Maine Historical Society
By the 1820s, enough black families called Portland home to form their own church. Although there were other churches in Portland in which to worship, the treatment the black members of the church experienced from their fellow church goers was not welcoming. Prominent black community members wrote a letter in 1826 to the Second Congregational Church in Portland, protesting their treatment. It listed several examples of grievances, including,
“Our numbers amount to about six hundred. Provision for the accommodation of a very few of our people is made in several houses of public worship; but while the provision is totally inadequate to our wants, the privilege granted us is associated with such circumstances, calculated to repel rather than to invite our attendance. Nay, pardon our misapprehensions if they be such, we have sometimes thought our attendance was not desired.”
From that letter, the Abyssinian Religious Society was incorporated in 1828. The meetinghouse was built in the 1830s on land owned by Reuben Ruby, at the corner of Mountfort and Newbury Streets, where it still stands. The church remained in use until 1916.
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