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St. Lawrence County, the largest in New York, covers nearly 3,000 miles of small towns, forests, and farms. In the nineteenth century, some thirty Universalist groups called it home. Today, only one remains: the Unitarian Universalist Church of Canton, which was founded in 1825 as the First Universalist Society.
Tucked in the foothills of the sprawling Adirondack Mountains, the town of Canton, replete with Victorian homes and historic stone buildings, is twenty minutes south of the Canadian border and an hour from a major highway. The church sits on Main Street in a beautiful gray building built in 1897 of locally sourced marble. It has a bell tower and a porte-cochère for horse-drawn carriages; the sanctuary boasts thirty-foot ceilings, an organ older than the building, and fifteen stained glass windows, many with Christian motifs.
Rev. James Galasinski
Last November, I sat in the minister’s office with Rev. James Galasinski, who, after serving the Canton congregation for a decade, will in August become minister of the River Road UU Congregation in Bethesda, Maryland. From the sanctuary we were serenaded by the sound of a young boy taking piano lessons from a congregant, as Galasinski described how the church is looking to the future while grounded solidly in its past.
Canton is small and geographically isolated. But because it’s home to two undergraduate schools, and is the county seat, it feels bigger than its population of 7,000, he said. Church members were heavily involved in the 1856 founding of St. Lawrence University, a liberal arts college of 2,000 students that originally included a Universalist seminary, the Theological School of St. Lawrence University, which closed in 1965. State University of New York at Canton, with about 2,800 students, started in 1906 as an agricultural school, and its first board president was Rev. James Payson, minister of the Universalist church that became the UU church.
“I always tell people, if it wasn’t for this church, there wouldn’t be two universities here, and if it wasn’t for those two universities, there wouldn’t be a church here now,” said Galasinski.
In such a small community, relationships mean everything. After a new Canton police chief, Ryan Cole, was sworn in in late 2024, Galasinski invited him to the church to get acquainted and they “had a great conversation,” Galasinski said.
A few months later, Galasinski called Cole after the congregation’s new Progress Pride flag was stolen off the front of the building. “He was really supportive—I’m getting teary eyes now—because he said, ‘I’ll do everything I can to support you and your church to live out your values,’” Galasinski recalled. He pointed to a camera mounted on the front of the building next to the new Progress Pride flag and added, “He personally installed the camera. It’s Canton Police property, and he came out and did it himself. Part of it was that he’s a really great guy, but I think it’s also because we had a connection.”
The Canton UU congregation has 170 members, which is about 2 to 3 percent of the population of Canton.
Close to the Canadian border, Canton has borne for years the noticeable presence of federal immigration agents. In April 2025, after a local mother and her children were arrested by ICE at a dairy farm and sent to a detention center in Texas, the congregation’s social action team joined a coalition that organized about 1,000 people to protest at the upstate New York home of White House “border czar” Tom Homan. Days later the family was released. “You talk about ‘Meet the Moment’—and that’s an example, definitely,” Galasinski said.
The UU Church of Canton has been integral to this area for more than 200 years. Next door, in a historic building that was formerly the parsonage, the St. Lawrence County Center for History and Culture ran a months-long exhibit in 2025 about the congregation’s long history and role in local life.
The congregation has 170 members, about 2 to 3 percent of the population of Canton. Sunday services typically draw eighty to one hundred people, including children in religious education.
“If New York City had a church with 2 to 3 percent of the local population, they’d have a huge megachurch!” said Galasinski.
Celebrating a Joint Bicentennial with the New York State Convention of Universalists
The Canton UU congregation, founded in 1825, celebrated its bicentennial in October 2025.
In 2025, the church celebrated its bicentennial with special events each month, culminating in a November celebration at which it hosted the New York State Convention of Universalists, which was celebrating its own bicentennial. Unitarian Universalist Association President Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt and Rev. Dr. Adam Robersmith, senior minister of the Universalist Church of West Hartford, Connecticut, and a member of the UUA Board of Trustees, traveled to Canton to present the keynote address and a workshop on leading with love at the center.
“We wanted something to be joyful about, something to celebrate, something to bring the UUA president here and former ministers back to celebrate,” Galasinski explained.
The joint bicentennial celebration drew UUs from all over New York to Canton, almost like a mini-General Assembly, the annual meeting of the UUA, he said, adding, “It was a reminder that our movement isn’t just this little town—it’s big.”
As part of its year of celebration, former UUA President Rev. Dr. John Buehrens gave a sermon at the church in November. “He said that the reason to celebrate and remember is to reflect on the vision forward,” Galasinski said.
Galasinski believes in having a bold vision but also being flexible with it so you can change course when “you feel the tug of spirit.” His biggest worry for the faith is “that we’re not going to meet the moment, and we’re not going to be innovators.” While it’s important to acknowledge history, he said, especially at a storied congregation like the UU Church of Canton, the point of celebrating a bicentennial is to keep things moving forward. “We don’t want to get stuck in the past. This is a time and moment when we can look back, but it’s also a time to recognize what’s unfolding in front of us.”
Adapting to Change and Building Beloved Community in Canton
After the pandemic, the church focused on building community and building connections so the church could make an impact.
Meet the Moment is the UUA’s movement-wide framework helping UUs analyze, discern, and take values-based action in response to today’s religious, cultural, generational, and political realities. The Canton congregation has adopted some tools suggested by Meet the Moment, including holding a shorter service on a recent Sunday so that congregants could break out afterwards into discussion groups.
Meeting the moment also means that, in today’s difficult times, the congregation is an antidote and a healing place that at the same time squarely faces the social justice issues that demand response, Galasinski said.
At least twelve new members have joined the congregation since Trump was reelected in 2024—“for us, that is big,” Galasinksi said—and a lot of younger people have started to come. “They’re telling me, ‘We need community.’ I think a lot of people are living in fear. They are grieving for a country they thought they had, and they want community and joy. That’s a way to counter this authoritarianism and fascism going on.”
He added, “The thing churches do in American society is build community and social capital, build movement, build connections to do things.”
To draw people back after the pandemic, the congregation started a Friday night jazz club that has drawn about seventy people each time, including families with children. The event raises money for the Church and Community Food Pantry Program, which was started some fifty years ago by a former UU Church of Canton minister and other local faith leaders. In response to feedback from families, the congregation holds a Friday night dinner that twenty to thirty people attend each week. And when parents said they needed somewhere for their children to go during a week in August when there were no summer camps, the congregation started a camp that drew a dozen kids, half of them previously unconnected to the church. “I feel that was meeting people where they’re at, and doing the mission,” Galasinski said.
Paul Siskind moved to Canton from Minneapolis twenty-eight years ago with his husband, Todd Moe. They were warmly welcomed as a gay couple at a time when that was unusual at local churches and have been deeply involved in the congregation ever since. “The notion of being a community center is very much connected to the spiritual grounding and purpose of the church,” said Siskind. The couple launched with an endowment the UU Church of Canton’s Social Justice Initiative, a series of biannual events focusing on social justice issues in the North Country, as this area is known.
Moe said the Christian iconography on the stained-glass windows “sometimes strikes people as a little odd, but I think it speaks to the history of the church and congregation, that yeah, 200 or 150 years ago it was a belief system and that’s fine, that changes. We can be proud of that, but it doesn’t define who we are today.” He noted that a young family had recently joined the church, traveling an hour each way to get there. Its two daughters are part of a Saturday night Dungeons & Dragons club the congregation launched about a year earlier. “I think about what people 100 years ago would think of role-playing games being part of church,” Moe added, with a laugh.
The Christian iconography on the stained-glass windows is a visible part of the church’s 19th century origins.
Cathy Crosby began attending the church in 2019 after Galasinski invited her teenage daughter, who is transgender, to be a pulpit guest and join him in talking about being an ally to trans youth. Crosby has attended nearly every Sunday since. “I discovered that many of the people in Canton who I had respected and admired were members of the church,” said Crosby, an associate professor of psychology at St. Lawrence University, who is retiring earlier than planned, in part to have more time to serve the church and its mission.
While inclusivity is central to UU values, “our location makes being so inclusive risky,” added Crosby, president of the church’s board. “We live in a liberal village, but it is situated within a very red county. We are not quiet about what we believe. The fact that the church installed a Black Lives Matter sign and displays a Progress Pride flag in a county that has signs all over professing the opposite tells our community members that we are willing to be unpopular to live our values. It also tells people that they are welcome here, and we have become a safe haven for so many people, especially in the last decade.
“I think our long history in the North Country offers us bravery to face the challenges of today,” Crosby said. “We have been through a lot up here, and often our church has stood alone against the forces of the day that were inconsistent with our principles and values. And we have persisted. We will continue to persist because we know that others believe what we believe, and respect and value the stands that we take.”