Death and Rebirth of a Church

Throughout the 1940's and into the early 1950's membership at Plymouth Spiritualist Church had dwindled to a congregation much smaller than the original 1200 capacity church needed.

With hardly enough active members to afford to keep the great building going, the state was able to acquire the property and planned to demolish the church to make space for the construction of the Inner Loop and County Jail.

In an interview with the Democrat and Chronicle from 1953 Lewis M. Caves, then President of Plymouth Spiritualist Church, lamented that the dwindling membership was due to a series of Pastors "who didn't set too well" with the congregation.

With Rev. Helen Graham as Pastor, the small congregation left Rochester's grand historic International Shrine of Spiritualism to find a new home.

After a year of temporarily meeting in hotels and houses, in 1955 the Plymouth congregation found a new home for a new era. The property was not far from the original location, and was located on Flint St; it had previously belonged to the First Church of the Nazarene.

Although the membership of the great “International Shrine of Spiritualism” had fallen, and the Plymouth congregation had become much more modest in size, the Spiritualist Community as a whole in Rochester actually remained quite strong.

It seems that with the development of Spiritualism over the years in Rochester, a single Spiritualist community centered around Plymouth was becoming more and more difficult to manage. The Rochester Spiritualist community slowly began to shift towards having smaller Spiritualist churches where members could find more varied and personal expressions of Spiritualism. It was actually in this era that Rochester began to see a rebirth of activity among Spiritualists, and the formation of a strong and diverse community.