The First Parish Church occupies a prominent location on a rise between downtown Brunswick and the Bowdoin College campus, which lies directly to its south.

It is a single-story wood frame structure, whose Gothic Revival features include a buttressed tower, lancet-arched openings for doors and windows, and vertical board-and-batten siding.

It was built, on the site of the third church, in 1846 by the labor of the congregation, to a design by the noted American architect Richard Upjohn.

[3] On May 2, 1851, American author Harriet Beecher Stowe had a vision while sitting in pew 23 of the church wherein she saw an enslaved man wounded from a beating he endured from his enslaver.

[4] The incident inspired her book Uncle Tom's Cabin.