Church History:

Early settlers found the twelve-mile trip to Sherborn too far to go for their weekly meetings.  After 50 years, 13 families asked to be set apart with their own meeting house.  On December 3, 1724 the General Court granted their petition with this amendment “Saving that the western part of Sherborn be a town and not a precinct.”

The town, Holliston, was named after Thomas Hollis, a wealthy merchant from England, who had given money to Harvard (University) for scholarships.  In January of 1725 five selectmen and the constable met and voted to build a meeting house “to worship God in on Lord’s Day and place it on the southeasterly side of Jasper’s Hill so called, on the westerly side of the road on the most rising ground—which is on the Honorable Col. Browne’s farm.”

In December 1726 the selectmen met to find a minister of the Gospel.  They spoke to a young James Stone, who had graduated from Harvard in 1724 and was teaching in Framingham.  When word reached London that one of his own Scholarship men had become the first minister of the church in the town that was named in his honor, Thomas Hollis responded by sending over a costly 1679 pulpit Bible.  This Bible is still in use in our sanctuary today.  It was rebound in memory of Frank Wesley Smith in 1962.