Rev. Jacob Lincoln Cook, founder of what would later become First United Presbyterian Church, got his start as a child selling tea cakes, which his mother made, in the dance hall that would later house his congregation.

Cook, who attended Fisk University in Nashville and performed with the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers, graduated from Knoxville College in 1888 and studied at Allegheny Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, PA. Upon graduation and ordination in 1890, he returned to Athens and established a Presbyterian mission in the dance hall.

The church was founded in 1889; three years later, in 1892, the current church building – designed in the early Gothic Revival style – was constructed on the dance hall site on Jackson Street in Downtown Athens.