Marlborough's First Church played a critical role in the town's history from its earliest years. The town's first Meeting House was built in 1663 on the Old Common on upper Main Street, burned in 1676, and rebuilt the following year. Its first two pastors, Reverend William Brimsmead and Reverend Robert Breck, were installed as young men and served until death; Brimsmead assembled a divided town to prepare for Indian attacks, and Breck encouraged area pastors to join the Marlborough Association for mutual discussion and benefit, which continued for more than 100 years. Both men were chosen to deliver the Commonwealth's prestigious Election Day Sermon. In 1805 the town voted to build a replacement Meeting House in the East Village on the present site, where it was called First Parish, while residents in the western part of town sought their own Meeting House on Pleasant Street that became Second Parish. The new eastern Meeting House opened in 1806 and housed the first casting of a Paul Revere bell inscribed, “I remind all of worship, liberty, burials and immortality.” That building was later replaced, but the newer building was destroyed by fire in 1852, and a larger church with a recast bell was built the following year. The name First Church in Marlborough (Congregational) was adopted in 1913. Crystal Catherine Eastman was born on June 25, 1881, in the old First Church parsonage at the corner of Bolton and Washington Streets while her father, Reverend Samuel Elijah Eastman, was the church's minister. She later became co-author with Alice Paul of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1920 and co-founder in 1917 of the American Civil Liberties Bureau, the forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union. After her family moved to Canandaigua, New York, her mother became one of the first women in America ordained as a Protestant minister, and both parents served as Congregational pastors near Elmira, New York. Crystal graduated from Vassar College in 1903 and earned an M.A. in Sociology from Columbia University in 1904. She became a lawyer, a leader in the fight for women's suffrage, a noted anti-militarist, and a co-founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In response to numerous arrests of anti-war figures in 1917, she and Roger Nash Baldwin began the American Civil Liberties Bureau to preserve free speech and conscientious objection. After ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote, she wrote “Now We Can Begin,” one of the most prominent speeches in the Women's Rights Movement. In 2000 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.