On a chance space of hard soil around Canton and Dedham Streets, in this marshy region, a suburban village of frame houses had gathered, and here a Sunday school was started as early as 1836. In January, 1842, a weekly prayer-meeting began at the house of Mr. Samuel C. Wilkins. On November 20, 1845, a church was formed, with fifty members. In the newly filled up land, the pile-driver was already busy in planting forests of full-grown trees head downward. All around were rising blocks of elegant houses, with promise of imposing civic and ecclesiastical edifices of various kinds. In the wider streets were gardens, parks, or ample strips of flower-beds. This was the land of promise, and into it pressed married couples by the hundreds, creating lovely homes, rearing families, and making this the choicest part of the young city. For, though "Boston town" is as old as Mother Goose's rhymes, the municipality of Boston was, in 1852, but thirty years old. The congregation of Christian people which, on April 14, 1849, took the name, as parish, of The Shawmut Congregational Society, and, as a church, one month later, the name of the Shawmut Congregational Church, occupied as a meeting-house first a hall, then a frame building, and finally a handsome edifice of brick, which was dedicated on the 18th of November, 1852. This building is now occupied by the Every Day Church, of the Universalist denomination. The tide of prosperity kept steadily rising. The throng of worshippers increased, until, in the very midst of the great Civil War, it was necessary to have more room. The present grand edifice on Tremont Street was erected and dedicated February 11, 1864; the Rev. Edwin Bonaparte Webb, who had been called from Augusta, Maine, being the popular and successful pastor. Boston was not then noted, as she certainly is now, for grandeur or loveliness in church edifices. Neither excellence nor taste in ecclesiastical architecture was, before the war, a striking trait of the city or the people. To-day her church spires and towers are not only numerous, but are famed for their variety and beauty. Fortunately for the future of Boston, the people of Shawmut Church found a good architect, who led the van of improvement in church architecture. The new edifice was the first one in the city on the early Lombardy style of architecture, and did much to educate the taste of the people of the newer and the older town, and especially those in the fraternity of churches called Congregational. Both its architecture and decoration have been imitated and improved upon in the city wherein it was a pioneer of beauty and the herald of a new order of church architecture. It is a noble vehicle of the faith and feelings of devout worshippers.