Meetinghouses of Early New England by Peter Benes (review)

It was beautiful, almost sublime in its simplicity. Nearly square, brilliantly white with two tiers of windows, and sheltered by a gable roof, Chestnut Hill Meetinghouse has lived long in my memory. As part of a field tour at the 2001 meeting of the Vernacular Architecture Forum in Newport, Rhode Island, we had traveled to visit one of New England’s best-preserved mid-eighteenth-century meetinghouses. I was in the midst of finishing my dissertation on Anglican churches of early South Carolina. Before me was something wholly different. The single open space of the interior was dominated by an elaborated pulpit centrally located on the long wall opposite the façade’s main door. A broad gallery ringed the chamber on the other three sides, hovering over the warren of box pews on the floor. It was, intentionally, an auditory and nothing more. My imagination populated the space with hundreds of auditors—some sleepy, others engaged—and a scholarly minister delivering a scrupulous sermon on the sovereignty of God. South Carolina’s Anglicans and their liturgical churches seemed a million miles away.

Chestnut Hill Meetinghouse is today an extraordinary survival, but in early New England, it was one of thousands of such buildings dotting the landscape. These are the subject of Peter Benes’s long-awaited Meetinghouses of Early New England. Scholars of early America will know well Benes’s earlier work on the subject, especially his 1979 New England Meeting House and Church: 1630–1850, an edited collection of essays published alongside an exhibition of the same title. That volume included important articles by Abbott Cummings, Jane Nylander, Robert Trent, Philip Zimmerman, and Benes himself. The intervening decades have allowed Benes, the director of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, to undertake an extraordinary project of apparently comprehensive data collection. He has systematically gathered information about more than 2,189 places of worship erected in New England and on Long Island between 1622 and 1830. And he tells us there were probably more. He has read all of the surviving congregation meeting minutes, hundreds of early local histories, and scores of other sources to assemble as complete as possible an understanding of these buildings. The result is an authoritative assessment of the building type, its variations over space and time, and the many textures of its lived experience. Benes’s book will be the exemplar for work in this area for a long time to come.

Meetinghouses of Early New England unfolds over ten chapters organized into three sections: “Background,” “Architecture,” and “Conclusions.” While all of the chapters are dense with primary evidence, not all offer an original argument. The chapters composing the “Background” section provide richly detailed narratives of the importance of these buildings in their communities and to their congregations. The “Architecture” chapters chart the gradual transformation of the meetinghouse as a type from the square buildings of the seventeenth century to the more “churchly” buildings of the early nineteenth. Over this period, these structures evolved from public spaces available for almost any use—including adjudicating civil cases—into sanctuaries reserved for the worship of God. The last section includes three nearly independent essays derived from evidence presented in the earlier chapters.

For many readers, the most important chapter will be the one on seventeenth-century meetinghouses that opens section two. Its first pages introduce the square meetinghouse with a pyramidal roof—many readers will know the sole surviving example, the meetinghouse in Hingham, Massachusetts, commonly called “Old Ship.” So-called “four-square” meetinghouses were the earliest and then predominant form in New England throughout the seventeenth century. As Benes suggests, previous generations of scholars have debated the importance of this form as uniquely American or European-derived. Those arguing the former cite the fact that such square meetinghouses are almost entirely absent from the English landscape in the same period and that the term “meetinghouse” appears in its earliest...