I’ve begun to work with the schedules of the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies, one of the censuses of American denominations and congregations conducted every ten years by the federal government until 1936. While the census was conducted for several decades. The original schedules with information on each individual congregation only survive for 1926. Fortunately they are now all digitized as part of the American Religious Ecologies project sponsored by the Roy Rosenweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

One interesting fact I cam across was there was a Universalist congregation known as the “United Liberal Church.” I was previously unaware of any Unitarian or Universalist church in Birmingham prior to the formation of what is now known as the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham in 1953.

The United church had been recently organized with 8 men and 9 women as members. The pastor was Dr. George A. Gay who served four other churches and the information was provided by S. C. Clements, the clerk of the congregation, whose address was 1584 20th Street North (that is in Druid Hills). Other schedules show that Gay also served the congregations in Ariton (60 members), Camp Hill (283), Cohassat (9), and Waverly (20 members). He was a graduate of Crane Theological School, the seminary at Tufts University.

I also found that the Rev. Monica Dobbins had written an article published in the 2018 issue of The Journal of Unitarian Universalist History which provides more information on Universalism in Birmingham. Basically, it never took off because the denomination never invested money in the city. That is one reason why by 1926 they had reorganized as a “united” church that might include, and be supported by Unitarians. Members of this congregation ended up contributing to the establishment the Unitarian Church of Birmingham in 1953 and the cooperation between the two denominations foreshadowed their union in 1961. For more of the interesting details, you can read Dobbins’s article which is available on line here.