The First Baptist Church of Charleston welcomes you, founded in 1682 as the oldest Baptist congregation in the American South. The congregation's origins trace to a group of Baptist settlers who sailed from Kittery, Maine, seeking religious freedom in the more tolerant Carolina colony. They found it here, establishing a church that would grow into one of the most influential Baptist congregations on the continent.
The current building, completed in 1822, was designed by Robert Mills, a Charleston native who later designed the Washington Monument and the United States Treasury Building. Mills's design is a masterwork of Federal-style architecture — a columned portico, clean geometric lines, and an interior of restrained elegance. In the antebellum period, the church's relationship to slavery followed the tragic pattern common to Southern Christianity: the congregation included both enslavers and the enslaved, who worshipped in separate sections and heard sermons that rarely challenged the institution that defined their lives.
The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 precisely to protect slavery from Northern abolitionist pressure within the national denomination. This building has stood through all of it — the compromises, the war, the long struggle toward something more honest. It remains a working congregation today.