Dover Point preserves the site of the First Parish Church’s second meetinghouse, built in 1653 near Dover’s earliest English settlement on the peninsula between the Piscataqua and Bellamy rivers and Great Bay. The congregation had been founded in 1633, and this modest building served both religious and community needs. Between 1667 and 1675, the site was fortified with an earthen embankment and log palisade, making it a rare colonial church site defended against Native attacks; those defenses seem to have aided the community during King Philip’s War. Though worship moved elsewhere by about 1720, the surviving foundations and earthworks remain an unusually clear record of early settlement, worship, and frontier defense.