William Arthur Memorial Church, Gubbi

The William Arthur Memorial Church stands on the Bangalore–Honavar road in Gubbi, about 80 km from Bangalore. A Gothic building finished in brick-red paint, it was completed in 1904 in place of the earlier Gobbee Chapel that Thomas Hodson had put up. Its name recalls William Arthur, a Wesleyan missionary from Ireland and a scholar of Canarese who worked in Gubbi, and belongs to the Karnataka Central Diocese of the Church of South India.

Gubbi was the only town apart from Bangalore to have a Wesleyan Canarese Mission station. Hodson preached his first sermon here on 1 September 1836 from an empty shop near the town gates; among his listeners was the village washerman Chikka, who became the first convert and took the name Daniel at his baptism in 1843. The mission began in April 1837, with Hodson and his wife living first in tents and then in a leaky thatched mud cottage, and the mission house was finished in 1839 at a cost of £180.