Houses of Worship

The town’s first houses of worship served both religious and civic purposes. The first three meetinghouses were built at the original settlement site on Old Sudbury Road. The fourth and fifth meetinghouses were built in the town’s center. (see Meetinghouses) The town supplied all financial support including money for the minister’s salary. These hardy Puritans, determined to “purify” the practices of the Anglican church, avoided using the word “church” for almost a full century. Everyone was required by law to attend religious services twice on Sunday–both morning and afternoon. Early meetinghouse served as houses for worship and for town meetings, also held stores of ammunition. It was a gathering place for people to socialize, debate and vote, as well as worship. When the fifth meetinghouse was dedicated in 1815–at the location of today’s First Parish Church on the corner of Cochituate and Boston Post roads–it was to serve solely as a church, some nineteen years before separation of church and state was mandated in Massachusetts. (see Meetinghouses)

As early as the 1820s, some members of the First Parish, unhappy at the congregation’s movement toward Unitarianism, became dissatisfied and in 1828 organized the Evangelical Trinitarian Church and built their own small chapel. The chapel soon proved too small and a church with carriage shets was built in1835 on the west side of Cochituate Road. The organizers first formed as the Evangelical Society of East Sudbury or the Evangelical Religious Society. But it soon changed its name to the Evangelical Trinitarian Church in East Sudbury and in 1896 to the Trinitarian Congregational Church in Wayland. An early Covenant of the church (unfortunately undated) calls it the First Congregational Church Society.

The next church building in town was in Cochituate Village. Begun by a Wesleyan Methodist Society group in 1846, parishioners met in the south schoolhouse until a church was built at the present intersection of East Plain and Commonwealth roads. Construction of the church, however, caused much debate. Some members wanted to build on Main Street. Others, most probably members of the Loker family that lived in the area, wanted it in “Lokerville” where it was finally built. In 1850, however, the church blew down in a wind storm and was made to face Cochituate when it was rebuilt “to secure the attendance of a member who had objected to the orientation of the first building.” One can only assume that the first church faced Lokerville.

Sixteen years later, a group that included twenty-two of the village’s most influential members broke off from the Wesleyan Methodist and organized the Episcopal Methodist Society. Their church was completed in 1866 on a half-acre of land purchased from Mr. Charles R. Damon on Main Street at the corner of Damon Street. In 1869 Mr. Damon gave the site for the parsonage which was later replaced by an educational building and the Ladies Social Union. More renovations followed in the mid 1890s and 1950s. In 1962, a new fourteen-room wing was added to the church and in 1966 a church-sponsored preschool opened in the building.

The old Wesleyan Methodist Church in Lokerville continued to be used on occasion by Baptists and certain revival and non-denominational groups. Eventually the original building fell into disrepair and, in 1902, after the death of Jefferson Loker at the age of ninety-three, the building was put up for auction. Loker, who had been a neighbor and a devoted church member, had donated a mahogany table and two collection boxes to the old church. Just before his death he bequeathed these items to the new Episcopal Methodist Church. At the auction, Edgar B. Loker bought the old building, moved it to his property, and made it into a hen house. The church site became an informal park.

When French and Irish immigrants came to work in the Cochituate shoe factories in the 1870s the village did not have its own Catholic Church. Many of the French speaking residents, comprising 22% of Cochituate’s population in 1880, came from Canada or had Canadian-born parents. The new parish activities began in 1879-80 and services, held upstairs in the Lokerville schoolhouse, began in French in 1881. They also attended services in Saxonville, Natick, Waltham and Marlborough. The Albert Dean home on the corner of Main Street and Shawmut Avenue was purchased to house Father Rainville, the first priest assigned to the Cochituate parish. In August 1889 ground was broken for St. Zepherin (St. Zepherin’s) on Willard Street behind the priest’s residence. It was dedicated on April 27, 1890. A new church was built in 1960, with the old one remaining as a parish hall, or social center, until it was demolished in 1989. The present rectory was built in 1965. A new parish center was built in 1991 and the original St. Zepherin church building demolished at this time. Major renovations were made to the church in October 1998.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Catholic population in Wayland Center had formed a parish and begun to meet upstairs over Lovell’s Store, the lovely old white-columned building originally built in 1841 as a town hall. (Town Halls) They built their own church, St. Ann’s, on the Boston Post Road in 1905 near the site of today’s post office. In 1959, a generous parishioner donated a fifteen-acre site on which to build a church less than a mile south of Wayland Center on Cochituate Road. In 1961, a thirteen-room rectory was completed and less than two years later, ground was broken for construction of a new Colonial style church next door. The old church on the Boston Post Road was razed in 1967 to clear land for a new post office.

Beginning in the late 1950s, a group of local residents met to discuss their interest in having an Episcopal church in town. In 1961 the Church of the Holy Spirit was incorporated as a mission. Services were held in schools, the First Parish Church, and Parmenter Health Center for several years. In 1963, Nathaniel Hamlen donated land on Rice Road for a church. A year later, the Reverend Donald W. Noseworthy, the first rector, dedicated the completed church building.

Peace Lutheran Church was organized in 1964 and a church built on a three-acre site on Concord Road. It was one of seventy-four congregations of the American Lutheran Church begun that year across the country. The congregation, which has always worshiped in this church, is part of the national church.

In the summer of 1978, a Reform Jewish congregation rented space at the First Parish Church in Wayland Center to celebrate holiday occasions and Shabbat services. The congregation quickly grew and in 1980 members of Temple Shir Tikva purchased a permanent home at the former site of Rosebud Gardens. (see Rosebud Gardens) The original building, extensively renovated, was dedicated in May 1981. Ten years later, a two-phase expansion project began. In 1992, an updated sanctuary for worship and a function/meeting hall were added to the existing building which was renovated for offices and classrooms. The original building was demolished in October 1997 and replaced by a new education center, dedicated in September 1998.

The Wellesley Park Assembly of God began in the campgrounds known as Wellesley Park in 1932 and moved to a new facility in Wayland on Loker Street in 1984. Confusion over its name Wellesley Park when located in Wayland prompted the congregation to change the name to Celebration International Church. Sunday worship is regularly attended by people from more than twenty nations.

The Islamic Center of Boston was started in 1979 in a public school facility in Cambridge. In 1988, the Islamic Center purchased a twelve-room house on 1.75 acres of land at 126 Boston Post Road. In the early nineties, a new building was constructed to provide additional classrooms and a larger prayer area. Parking facilities were later expanded after the center acquired an adjoining plot of land. Construction of an additional 14,000 square feet of building space began in 2004 after the original twelve-room house was demolished. The center serves the Muslim community west and north of Boston as well as families from New Hampshire and Falmouth. The center’s membership includes many ethnic groups and represents Muslims from all over the world.

The Conservative Jewish congregation Or Atid, meaning “light of the future,” celebrated a groundbreaking ceremony in September 2001 at 97 Concord Road, site of their new synagogue. Organized in 1991, families had met in the First Parish Church in Wayland, sent older children to religious school at Temple Israel of Natick, and in 1992 celebrated high holiday services at the Unitarian Church in Weston. On September 1, 2002, congregants, family, friends and neighbors marched with Or Atid’s Torah from the congregation’s first home at First Parish to its new permanent home. A week later, the quest for a permanent home over, 120 families worshiped in their spacious new facility.

The eleven different houses of worship within the town’s fifteen square mile boundary are a tribute to the great diversity of our community.