File:First United Methodist Church, Niagara Falls, New York - 20210311.jpg

English: First United Methodist Church, 8210 Buffalo Avenue, Niagara Falls, New York, March 2021. A fine example of late-period Neoclassical church architecture, the design of First Methodist is simple but elegant: two stories tall with a flat roof, the building is faced in blonde brick and has a façade that's dominated by an elegant tetrastyle Ionic temple front, with the name of the church inscribed in the entablature below the main pediment. A swan's-neck pediment graces the central window on the first floor, and cut-stone swag reliefs frame the façade at the second-story level. A late '60s- or early '70s-era porte-cochère appended to the east side of the building is complementary in style, with identical twenty-pane stone-silled windows and Doric pillars and pilasters. Appropriately enough given its name, First Methodist was the first religious congregation of any denomination to set up shop in the LaSalle area at the east end of the city, which was then an independent village. Its history dates back to 1836, when a Sunday school and religious society was founded by local schoolmarm Louisa Danforth and a group of eight friends whose homes were too distant from what's now downtown Niagara Falls to make attendance at St. Paul's on 7th Street a feasible proposition. This organization became a full-fledged religious congregation in 1854, with itinerant preachers (so-called "circuit riders") holding services in a modest-scaled brick building under the name Cayuga Creek Methodist Episcopal Church, later renamed LaSalle Methodist Episcopal. It being the only one in the area, the "little brick church" also hosted Free Methodist, Presbyterian, Mennonite, and other services in its earliest years. A parsonage built in 1904 facilitated the church's employment of a resident preacher rather then the itinerant ones, and soon the congregation had grown enough that a new building was needed, planning for which began in 1916 and which was dedicated eight years after that.