Meetinghouses of Early New England

7. Meetinghouses of the Early Nineteenth Century

204 C H A P T E R S E V E N Meetinghouses of the Early Nineteenth Century  The increasing presence of compass windows, steepled bell towers, Georgian decorative modes, and interior and exterior colors in the eighteenth-century meetinghouse argues that New England’s Reformed congregations were no longer satisfied to attend religious services in a school-like or “intellectual” setting. In the first period the material assemblage (the pulpit, the canopy, the pulpit surrounds, and the Communion table) that allowed church leaders to teach the Gospel and administer the sacraments was centralized in an enclosure characterized by its architectural “negation” (to use Anthony Garvan’s term). In the second period, parishioners increasingly wanted to extend this sacramental space outward and to convene on the Sabbath in a “comely” and “elegant” place marked by gentility, comfort, and taste. This continued aspiration ushered in the Federal-period and Greek Revival houses of worship of the third period during which scores of towns and parishes followed the lead of Salisbury, Connecticut , which decided in 1798, “We will build a Meeting House in the modern style.”¹ By virtually every measure the “modern style” found builders deeply influenced by the Anglican formula. The eighteenth-century axial plans of the most important urban Episcopal churches in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island offered the principal entry through the bell tower; a main alley aligned along the length of the building; and a prominent altar, pulpit, and Communion table that provided the focus of the interior space. In a dramatic reversal, architects of third-period Reformed meetinghouses essentially adopted all three elements of this axial plan except the prominence of the altar, which remained excluded. The short end of the building was turned ninety degrees to “face” the street; the formal bell tower or “portico” was now a main entry; and the long aisle leading from the door to the pulpit was realigned along the principal axis of the building. These “improvements” came with new amenities, such as slip Meetinghouses of the Early Nineteenth Century 205 pews, pew cushions, curtains for the windows, chandelier lighting, heating stoves, and lavish use of gilt surfaces and decorative textiles to “dress” the pulpit .² No one could now argue that this was a “municipal” building or even a “schoolhouse.” The seeds of change were already present in the early eighteenth century. Because of restricted land use, the narrow end of two important Congregational meetinghouses in Boston—the 1721 New Brick and the 1729 Old South— actually did face the street. Edward Pell, the painter-stainer who “drew the plan” of the New Brick, sited its bell tower in one of two main thoroughfares of the town’s North End (Hanover Street) and allowed for an entry into the bell tower that in part competed with the main entry on the long side.³ Eight years later when Robert Twelves, the builder of the Old South, used the site of its predecessor (the Old Cedar) at the corner of Milk and Marlborough Streets, he was obliged to squeeze the new ninety-five-by-sixty-eight-foot dimensions into a location that had previously accommodated a seventy-five-by-fifty-one-foot structure. Twelves’s layout, detailed years later by Maj. Thomas Dawes (1731– 1809) when he was making improvements to the meetinghouse in 1770, shows that the best location for the bell tower was on the west side facing Boston’s Marlborough Street, now Washington Street, the principal thoroughfare in South Boston.⁴ Twelves’s design encouraged parishioners to enter through the tower doorway—which thus served as a portico even though the “main” entry was still on Milk Street opposite the pulpit. Twelves subtly reinforced this shift by placing the interior stairwells to the two tiers of galleries on the west or tower side, not on the side facing Milk Street.⁵ It is unclear how many other Reformed houses of worship in Boston made similar compromises. John Bonner’s 1743 map, A New Plan of the Great Town of Boston, indicates that Mather Byles’s meetinghouse faced Hollis Street in much the same way.⁶ According to a late nineteenth-century drawing of the second meetinghouse of Boston’s First Baptist Church, raised in 1771, the structure was jammed into a narrow space that required builders to eliminate the main entry on the long side and install three entrances at one of its smaller ends, one of them leading to a two-floor stairwell porch.⁷ Space was always at...