These two illustrations depict different kinds of rebuilding. In the bottom image, subtitled "Laying the Cornerstone of the First Building after the Fire," dozens of workers watched by scores of onlookers start the reconstruction process, with the ruined Court House in the background. In the top image, "The Reverend Mr. Collyer Preaching on the Site of His Church," Unity's minister, Robert Collyer, delivers an inspirational sermon amidst the ruins. Born in Yorkshire, Collyer was trained as a blacksmith before becoming a minister and emigrating to America. He was an ardent abolitionist during the Civil War era and one of the city's most beloved preachers.
North Division resident Emma Hambleton told her mother in a letter written right after the fire that, while fleeing herself, she ran into Collyer, who told her, "We are no longer safe here. I have just seen the last of my home, and now my church must go." Hambleton added, "The great man sobbed like a babe." But on the first sabbath after the fire, Collyer met with members of several congregations among the ruins of Unity in a gathering that one fire history likened to "a convention of early Christians in the catacombs." Like the narrative of W. D. Kerfoot setting up for business again the day after the fire, the story of this service at Unity was cited often in the reporting of the fire. The story of the worship service at Unity seemed to prove that Chicago's moral character had been purified and strengthened by the fire.
As was the case with St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Old Town, a portion of Unity's walls were sound enough to be integrated into the building that replaced it. This building was erected in 1873. It was designed by the architects Edward Burling and Dankmar Adler, before Adler’s partnership with Louis Sullivan. In 1900 the church was sold to the Masons fraternal organization and became the Medinah Temple, which subsequently moved to its new building on Wabash Avenue between Ohio and Ontario streets (now occupied by the Bloomingdale’s department store) in 1912. The Masons kept the Unity Church building, but it became the Scottish Rite Cathedral. In 2009 the organization sold the entire block bordered by Walton, State, Delaware, and Clark to a developer that announced that while it would build a luxury high-rise on the rest of the property, it would remodel the Scottish Rite Cathedral and a few nineteenth-century mansions on the block and market them as unique upscale residences.
