Its founding was in part the result of a small group of Chicago Unitarians with the minister Charles Follen.

[4] The building, twice enlarged before it burned down, held the first church bell in Chicago placed there in January 1845.

A new edifice was built in 1925 in an English perpendicular Gothic style, a gift of church member and Illinois US Representative Morton D. Hull whose ashes now rest in the crypt below the building.

[7] In 1956, the Chicago Children's Choir was founded in the church by assistant minister Christopher Moore.

Alan Seaburg, The Unitarian Pope, Brooke Herford's Ministry in Chicago and Boston, 1876–1892, 2015