First Christian Church of Frankfort
Frankfort, Franklin County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
First Christian Church. Organized December 2, 1832, by noted minister and educator Philip S. Fall, aided by John T. Johnson. Services held at various locations until 1842 when church erected on this site. Alexander Campbell preached here. Church burned, 1870; Emily T. Tubman gave money to erect second building. Part of it utilized in present edifice, completed, 1924. Presented by First Christian Church.
Erected by Kentucky Historical Society
The Story
Founded in December 1832 by the noted minister-educator Philip S. Fall, this congregation belonged to the Restoration Movement whose champion, Alexander Campbell, preached from its pulpit. After fire destroyed the church in 1870, philanthropist Emily T. Tubman funded a new building, part of which survives in the sanctuary completed in 1924.
Why it matters
The church reflects the frontier-born Disciples of Christ movement and the generosity of Emily Tubman, one of Kentucky's most influential women of means.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The congregation here was organized in 1832, in the middle of an era when American religion was being reshaped from the ground up. The old established churches of the colonial period were giving way to a restless, revival-driven Christianity, and nowhere was that energy stronger than on the trans-Appalachian frontier where Kentucky sat.
Frankfort itself was by then a settled state capital, but the religious currents running through it were anything but settled. A movement was underway to strip away denominational labels and creeds and return to what its leaders saw as the simple pattern of the New Testament church—a movement that found especially fertile ground in Kentucky and the Ohio Valley.
Across the nineteenth century the congregation lived out the ordinary trials of an American church: worshiping in borrowed rooms before it could build, raising its own house of worship, losing it to fire, and rebuilding. By the time the present building was completed in the 1920s, the frontier faith of 1832 had matured into an established downtown congregation.
People & events
The church was organized in December 1832 by Philip S. Fall, a minister and educator of real note, with the help of John T. Johnson. For its first decade the young congregation had no building of its own, meeting wherever it could until it finally erected a church on this site in 1842.
That modest beginning drew an outsized figure to its pulpit: Alexander Campbell, one of the towering leaders of the era's Restoration Movement, preached here. His presence tied this local congregation directly to the national effort to unite Christians on the New Testament alone.
Disaster came in 1870, when the church burned. Into the gap stepped Emily T. Tubman, a woman of great means and greater generosity, who gave the money to raise a second building. Part of that structure was carried forward into the present edifice, completed in 1924—so that even now the sanctuary holds something of the church Tubman rebuilt from the ashes.
Its place in the American story
This congregation is a living thread of the Restoration Movement, one of the most distinctly American religious developments of the nineteenth century. Born on the frontier and impatient with inherited creeds, it sought Christian unity through a return to the New Testament and gave rise to the Disciples of Christ and related churches that spread across the country.
Alexander Campbell's preaching here is the local point of contact with a movement that reshaped American Protestantism far beyond Kentucky. Small-town and capital-city congregations like this one were the movement's real engine—the places where big ideas about unity and restoration became weekly worship.
Emily Tubman's role points to another national theme: the outsized influence of women of means in building nineteenth-century America's churches, schools, and charities. In an age when women were largely shut out of formal power, philanthropy was one of the few levers they could pull—and she pulled it here to lasting effect.
If you visit
Stand in the sanctuary and remember that you're not looking at a single moment frozen in time but at layers. The 1924 building incorporates part of the structure Emily Tubman funded after the 1870 fire, so the walls around you carry more than one century's worth of the congregation's life.
Let the long arc sink in: a church organized in 1832 that met in borrowed spaces for a decade, built, burned, rebuilt, and rebuilt again. Few congregations wear their whole story so plainly, and the marker helps you read it.
As a stop, it fits neatly into a walking tour of Frankfort's historic core alongside the capital's government and residential landmarks. Even a few quiet minutes out front, with the marker's two names—Campbell and Tubman—in mind, connects a downtown church to a movement that swept the young nation.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Philip S. Fall
- · Alexander Campbell
- · Emily T. Tubman
- · John T. Johnson
Themes & tags
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