Asylum Hill Congregational Church Celebrates Its Fiftieth Anniversary

F. Irvin Davis gave a history of the church in chronological order on March 1, 1908.

The church would next celebrate its history on March 24, 1940.

The First Baptist Church was organized on March 23, 1865, the same day that the Asylum Hill Congregational Church was organized.

1. From Potter’s address: “It was not without pain and travail that the mother church brought forth this church.  As I scanned the marks on the records which showed how strong men and women were dismissed to become members of this church I could imagine somewhat the pangs suffered by dear old Dr. Hawes as he watched them go to undertake this new enterprise.”
2. From Collins’s address: “To obtain the proper setting for the story of the founding of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church, it will be necessary to thrown on the screen a different Hartford and another Lord’s Hill.  Forget, if you please, the streets solidly built up with houses, the sidewalks, asphalt and macadam pavement, the electric lights, and the pedestrians, trolley and motor cars that now make up our daily moving picture.”
3. From Collins’s address: “The American Asylum at Hartford for the education and instruction of the deaf and dumb, according to the ponderous title which it then bore, will soon celebrate its centennial on the present site.  To this institution, we are indebted for the name of the street, avenue, and church.  The deaf graduates of the school, feeling the name ‘asylum’ to be a stigma on their class, agitated years ago to such effect that the name of the school was changed by legislative enactment.  Despite sporadic protest of residents, the name ‘asylum’ adheres to street, avenue and locality.”
4. From Pratt’s address: “We can make a rough calculation of the money outgo from our circle since the beginning.  About $200,000 has gone into the church and its equipment, and about $500,000 into salaries and maintenance.  The regular contributions have yielded about $250,000, while probably three times this has been otherwise given.  The total benevolences are not far from $1,0000,000.  Thus we have lent a hand to every phase of philanthropy in the city, to every movement for evangelization and church extension in the state and throughout the union, to the cause of the negro, the Indian, the ‘poor white,’ the immigrant and the dependent, to the upbuilding and maintenance of many schools and colleges, to the printing and circulation of Bibles and Christian literature, and to the prosecution of several kinds of missionary work in nearly every continent of the globe.”
5. From Wolcott’s remarks: “I consider it a great pleasure and privilege to come back like the three disciples did to the mount of transfiguration.”
6. From Parker’s remarks: Let me know lift a corner of the curtain which veils the stage and scene upon which your first minister made his initial appearance.  Happily for him and for you, he came here at a time and in circumstances most favorable.  Hartford was a freer place, as regards religious thought and utterance, after the great war.  Theological contentions had considerably abated.  The watchmen on the walls of orthodoxy had so far relaxed their vigilance that candidates for the Gospel ministry were less severely scrutinized than formerly.  It was no longer a misfortune for a young minister to enjoy the favor of Dr. Bushnell, nor a detriment to be known as his disciple.”

1. Joseph Hooker Twichell was the pastor of the Milford (NH) Congregational Church.
2. Rockwell H. Potter was the pastor of the Center Congregational Church.
3. Atwood Collins was a deacon at Asylum Hill Congregational Church.
4. Waldo Pratt was on the faculty of the Hartford Theological Seminary.
5. The greeters with Twichell in the chapel were listed as “his daughters, Miss Sisan Twichell and Mrs. Howard Wood, his son and wife, Rev. Joseph Hooker Twichell and Mrs. Twichell, his cousin, Mrs. Charles E. Ives, and Dr. Voorhees and Mrs. Voorhees.” The article Is saying that “Mrs. Charles E. Ives” is Twichell’s cousin, but she was in fact Harmony Twichell Ives, his daughter.
6. Philip C. Walcott was the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Naugatuck and former assistant pastor at Asylum Hill Congregational Church.
7. Edwin P. Parker was pastor emeritus at the South Congregational Church.

Swartz, Melva J., “Hill Church Will Observe Anniversary,” Hartford Courant, March 18, 1940, page 1.

Unattributed, “Rev. Dr. Joseph H. Twichell Honored at Anniversary of His Church,” Hartford Courant, March 24, 1915, page 16.