The First Spiritual Temple

Amid the endless cafes, restaurants, and brownstone townhouses of the Back Bay stands this building, a structure you might mistake for a church. This large, Richardsonian Romanesque building was financed by Marcellus Ayer, a Boston businessman, and was completed and dedicated in 1885. This is the First Spiritualist Temple. 

Marcellus Ayer

Mr. Ayer, a businessman of the self-made variety, was a devout Spiritualist as well as a Christian. He constructed the temple as a place where he and like-minded individuals could gather for services, moral lectures and trance medium sessions. It was the blending of Christian and Spiritualist ideas that set his temple apart from the more mainstream Spiritualist groups.

The First Spiritualist Temple served as a meeting place for Boston’s Spiritualists in the late nineteenth century. Ayer’s congregation, The Spiritual Fraternity (originally The Working Union of Progressive Spiritualists) met in the Temple into the twentieth century. 

The building was re-purposed as a theater in 1914 and later became a cinema, but Ayer’s church continued to exist and lives on to this day.

One last note of interest, in relation to Boston's recent succession of time-capsule openings, is that a time capsule from the original construction was opened in 1985, 100 years after it's installation.