Founded by Roger Williams in 1638, your First Baptist Church in America rises at 75 North Main Street in College Hill. This is the oldest church in Rhode Island and the oldest Baptist church in the United States and the Americas, established here by Roger Williams in 1638. Roger Williams had been holding religious services in his residence for nearly a year before he converted his church into a Baptist church in 1638, two years after he founded Providence in 1636.
For the next sixty years the congregation met in residences or outdoors in pleasant weather, later erecting plain, Puritan-style meetinghouses. The building you face was erected between 1774 and 1775 and held its first meetings in May 1775; it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960. You can feel layers of belief in the pews: Roger Williams began as a Calvinist, and within a few years the congregation became more Arminian, identifying as a General Six-Principle Baptist church.
Today the church is affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA. Notice North Main Street stretching out and the College Hill neighborhood spreading beyond it.