The First Baptist Church in Massachusetts

Photographed by G.W.Bartlett, May 10, 2026

1. First Baptist Church in Massachusetts Marker

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The Committee’s mission and focus is the ongoing historical and archaeological research study of the site known as Lot 3A or Nockum Hill, a seventeenth-century Plymouth Colony frontier settlement, located within the Sowams Heritage Area.

The Doug Rayner Wildlife Refuge is located on Nockum Hill in Barrington on a peninsula extending into the Barrington River and Hundred Acre Cove estuary.

Photographed by G.W.Bartlett, May 10, 2026

2. The First Baptist Church in Massachusetts Marker

Owned by the Town of Barrington, the Refuge’s public hiking trails traverse more than 70 acres of field, forest and shoreline.

John Myles (c. 1621–1683) was a Welsh Baptist minister, founder of Swansea, Massachusetts, and founder of the earliest recorded Baptist churches in Wales (UK) and Massachusetts (US).
After the restoration of the monarchy, in 1660, and the requirement for all Puritan clerics to adhere to the Book of Common Prayer, in 1662, Myles and the Ilston congregation left England for the Plymouth Colony.
In America, Myles worked with the Congregationalist state church in Rehoboth, until the former Ilston congregation was told to leave the town because of Baptist views. Myles, then, led the congregation to found the town of Swansea and to establish the First Baptist Church in Swansea. Swansea was named after the town in their homeland in Wales. Myles continued to serve as minister for more than twenty years. During King Philip's War, Myles fled from the Indians to Boston, Massachusetts, and there pastored the First Baptist Church in Boston.

Photographed by G.W.Bartlett, May 10, 2026

3. The First Baptist Church in Massachusetts Marker

Rev. John Myles came to New England from Swansea, Wales, in 1663, being driven from his native land by religious persecution in the reign of Charles II. He settled in Rehoboth, Mass., and subsequently removed to that part of Sowams known as Wannamoisett, to which was given the name of Swansea, in remembrance of the Welsh town from which Mr. Myles came. In the old world he had been a successful preacher and leader of men, and in the new world such were his character and influence that he is worthy to be regarded as one of the founders of our free Republic, though his name does not always appear in the Encyclopaedias.

Nevertheless, as soon as it became known that a Baptist church had been organized, the churches of the colony solicited the court to interpose its influence against it, and Pastor Myles and James Brown were fined each £5 and Nicholas Tanner 20s. for setting up a pubHc meeting without the knowledge and approbation of the court, to the disturbance of the peace. They were further ordered to desist from their meeting for the space of a month, and advised to remove to some place where they would not prejudice any other church.

The First Baptist Church of Swansea may look like a traditional, Greek Revival style church from the 1840s, a common form and style found in nearly every community in New England, but the church is home to the oldest Baptist congregation in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and is the fourth oldest in the United States! The church (and town’s name) was founded by Reverend John Myles (c. 1621–1683), a Baptist minister who immigrated to present-day Swansea from Swansea in Wales, who was a founder of the earliest recorded Baptist churches in Wales.

...there is no evidence that a properly organised, distinct and visible church of Baptist believers existed in Wales before 1 October 1649. It was on that date that John Miles established his Baptist church at Ilston. Miles founded his first Baptist congregation at Ilston, where he served from 1649 as rector of the parish church in place of an ejected royalist, William Houghton. We know a great deal about the Baptist congregation through the chance survival of the ‘Ilston Churchbook’, now preserved in America.