The history of the church is associated with a community of "Foreign Protestants" (mostly German Palatines) who settled in the northern suburbs of Halifax between 1750 and 1752.

[5] Paul B. Williams, who participated in the excavation and examination of remains later found at the church site, hypothesized in a 2003 article that the disease the migrants brought with them may have been typhus.

[5] Coinciding with this epidemic, an estimated thirty individuals were buried in a mass grave on the grounds upon which the church would be built only a few years later.

[6] Osteo-archaeological investigations conducted in the 1990s found that the individuals buried in the grave were of mixed sex and age, but a majority were adults.

[7] None of the bones showed signs of trauma or long-term health problems, likely indicating a cause of death which was fast-acting and only affected the soft tissue.

[7] The grave site was initially assumed to be exclusively that of Europeans, but it was later found that the skull of one individual was of a man in his twenties who may have been indigenous.

While this was not conclusively determined, skull morphology indicated "characteristics more commonly associated with someone of aboriginal North American rather than of central-European or African origin,"[7] and distinctive wear patterns on the individual's teeth were similar to those of people eating a hunter-gatherer diet consisting of foods such as dried meats and seeds.

[12] However, he also raised concerns about the process as one which did not pay heed to archaeological and forensic discoveries on the site, and did not also include First Nations and Afro-Nova Scotian perspectives.