Members of the Myrtle Baptist Church congregation and neighbors gather in 1898 to celebrate the newly rebuilt church following a fire the previous year.

In the 1870s, African-American Newton residents established a neighborhood in the area of Curve Street. This historic neighborhood came to be known as “the Village,” within the village of West Newton. Some residents found employment nearby at the Boston & Albany depot, with its associated lumberyards and warehouses. 

Initially, many of these African-American families worshipped together with progressive white Newtonians and abolitionists at the church now known as Lincoln Baptist. In 1874, those families moved to form their own church, establishing Myrtle Baptist Church. The first church, built in 1875, was destroyed by fire and rebuilt in 1898. The thriving community, offering jobs and the promise of property ownership, attracted other African-American families to the Village from Boston and farther away.

In the early 1960s, the chosen route for the Boston extension of the Massachusetts Turnpike bisected the Myrtle Baptist neighborhood, destroying homes and businesses and displacing families. Some continued to worship at Myrtle Baptist despite moving out of Newton, and the devastation of the neighborhood catalyzed residents, some descended from the original entrepreneurs, workers, and property owners, to form the Newton Fair Housing Committee in the 1960s.