Blaney Memorial Baptist Church

Image: No. 207 Postcard. Blaney Memorial Baptist Church & Parsonage, circa 1910.

Located at 60 Richmond Street, the Blaney Memorial Baptist Church was organized November 13, 1882, with a membership of twenty-five. Before this, meetings had been held in Hutchinson’s Hall for six months in 1879 and beginning again in January, 1881. In April, 1882, the services moved to Associates Building, where the people met for six years. Miss Mercy Blaney died in 1886, leaving $20,000 for the building of a church, which was erected at the southeast corner of Richmond Street and Dorchester Avenue in 1887. The church was representative of the Carpenter Gothic style of the mid 19th century. The parsonage next door still stands as a private residence. The church building itself stood where the parking lot for the Meeting House Cooperative Bank is now located. It was taken down in the 1980s when the land was sold to the bank.


The pastors and their periods of tenure were:

Nathan Hunt, 1882-1890
J.N. Shipman, 1890-1895
E.S. Wheeler, 1895-1899
L.R. Swett, 1900-1909
Allan A. Rideout, 1910-
Eugene Dinsmore Dolloff


For more information, consult:

Chaffee, John R. The History of the First Methodist Episcopal Church, Dorchester, Massachusetts. (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1917)

Dorchester Old and New, 1630-1930. (Dorchester: Chapple Publishing Company for the Dorchester, Massachusetts, Tercentenary Committee, 1930)

Shand Tucci, Douglass. The Gothic Churches of Dorchester.( Issued by the Dorchester Savings Bank. Boston: Tribune Publishing Company, 1972)

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April 14, 2020