Tremont Temple's first article describes a congregation built on refusing pew rents; the man whose own expulsion made that a founding principle rather than a slogan was Timothy Gilbert, a Boston piano manufacturer and committed abolitionist. In 1836 Gilbert, a member of a congregation that met in Boston's Charles Street Meeting House, invited Black friends to fill his own pew alongside him, directly challenging a segregated seating custom most Boston churches of the period enforced without controversy. The congregation expelled him for it.
Gilbert did not retreat from the confrontation; he organized around it. Working through another Baptist congregation for several years, he helped gather the members who in 1839 formed the Free Baptist Church, open to worshippers of every race on equal terms, a body the National Park Service credits as the first integrated church in Boston. When that congregation outgrew its early meeting spaces, Gilbert was among the members who in 1843 raised the money to buy the old Tremont Theatre and convert it into Tremont Temple, financing the free seating he had been expelled for demanding through paying tenants rather than paying pewholders.
That financing model, ground floor storefronts and upper story offices leased to businesses so that worship itself stayed free, survived Gilbert himself, who died in 1865, and outlasted the fires that later destroyed the building he had helped buy. When architect Clarence Blackall designed the current Renaissance Revival Tremont Temple after the last of those fires, completed in 1896, he built the same arrangement into the new structure, retail space and commercial offices funding a sanctuary Gilbert would have recognized as continuous with the pew that had cost him his church sixty years earlier.