The first church, set up or built in the year 1643, was on the present Church Street, Albany, N.Y. It was called in the year 1676, the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church at New Albany and in 1683, the Church of Jesus Christ at New Albany.

Later, in the year 1656, a block-house church of timber and boards was built at what is now the juncture of State Street and Broadway. This church was furnished with a bell, and a pulpit with an hour-glass sent from Holland.

 The third church, a structure of stone, was built around and over the smaller structure in 17??. Services continued to be held in the block-house church during the construction of the Stone Church, being interrupted for only three Sundays while the inner church was demolished and carried away through the doors and windows of the new church.

 For 64 years the congregation was housed in the Stone Church, until 1797 when the North Church, familiarly known as the "Two-steeple" or the "Double-Dutch" and now know as The First Reformed Church, was dedicated. The South or Beaver Street Church was dedicated in 1811. The old Stone Church had been sold in 1806 and torn down. The North and South Churches continued under the collegiate system as a single corporation until 1815, when each church was organized under it own Consistory and then these churches were incorporated as the First and Second Reformed Churches respectively. From the Beaver Street Church the congregation of the Second Church moved to a commodious new stone church on Madison Avenue at South Swan Street in 1881. In 1937 the Madison Avenue Church was destroyed by fire. Shortly after this the First and Second Reformed Churches reunited to become the First Church in Albany in the old "Two-Steeple" church. Among the treasured possessions of the congregation are the old pulpit and hour-glass first used in the block-house church, the famed weather-cock and the old silver Communion Service, some pieces of which date back to 1660.
 
 

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