Meetinghouses of Early New England

9. Meetinghouse Architecture as Puritan Ecclesiology

239 C H A P T E R N I N E Meetinghouse Architecture as Puritan Ecclesiology  When Elias Carter’s meetinghouse designs reached towns in southern and central New Hampshire in the 1820s, rural New England’s ecclesiastic architecture had finally achieved the “Transcendantly Magnificent” stature proudly proclaimed by the Woodbury town clerk Joseph Minor in 1747.¹ Carter’s meetinghouses , like those of Isaac Damon and other contemporary early nineteenthcentury architects, reflected a new “Federal” aesthetic that increasingly isolated these public buildings for the specific exercise of religious worship. Frontier and upland communities, whose first meetinghouses often bore the signs of a struggling rural population, could now worship in an edifice whose principal purpose was to serve their Christian faith. Though many were still underwritten by the town, meetinghouses were upgraded to an environment free of baseball play, winter mud, stray dogs, biting winds, and signs warning occupants not to slam the seats. Treaties with Native Americans were no longer negotiated in them; capital trials no longer took place within; executions no longer took place outside. The aisles were now carpeted. The air was soon to be heated by stoves. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The walls echoed with the sounds of trained singers. Pulpits were decorated with crimson damask, fringes, and tassels, and even some record-keeping books were “painted and glittered.” Few of these advances toward comfortable “churchly” architecture were new to the third period. They were evident in Boston meetinghouse architecture as early as 1699. And though the term church does not normally appear in the legal idiom of town and parish records, it appears often enough to help us recognize the increasingly ecclesiastic role of the meetinghouse in the early eighteenth century. In 1700 Rev. Benjamin Colman called the Brattle Street meetinghouse a “new built church.” Almost three decades later, in 1728, Westfield, Massachusetts , voted to raise fifty pounds for “a bell for the Church.”² There were other signs, too. Norwalk, Connecticut, voted in 1723 that nothing was to be done in 240 Chapter Nine the meetinghouse “but what is consistent with, and agreeable to the most pure and special service of God, for which end it was built and now devoted.” Leominster , Massachusetts, considered in 1740 whether “God’s Tabernacle should be erected here.” But it is also true that the issue was never entirely settled until the final disestablishment of Congregational and Presbyterian churches in the early nineteenth century. As late as 1817, a year after Bedford, Massachusetts, had completed its massive, Asher Benjamin–style meetinghouse, the town felt obliged to vote that “no town meetings, no training, nor choosing militia officers shall ever be held or done in the meetinghouse, and no other town business shall be done in said language house except by permission of the selectmen for the time being.”³ The story of New England’s early meetinghouse architecture centers on this transition. How did the vernacular “House[s] for Publick Assembly” (to use Isaac Chauncy’s term), which readily shared municipal, legal, and ecclesiastic uses become transformed into architecturally designed churches devoted to the “special service of God”? So far this study has revealed that meetinghouse styles were transmitted from one community to another like an idiomatic dialect. Indeed, towns and religious societies were just like individuals: they worked diligently to keep up with the styles of their neighbors. This awareness of what other towns were doing—a self-consciousness that characterized many aspects of Congregational polity and liturgical traditions—was the principal aesthetic impulse that created a “New England” style of meetinghouse architecture that encompassed subregional variations. Hingham’s 1680 vote to send three men to view neighboring Massachusetts meetinghouses to compare “their number of Inhabitants with ours,”⁴ or Haverhill’s 1696 decision to imitate meetinghouses in Beverly and Reading, was probably repeated hundreds of times in New England. That this impulse to imitate was always part of a common civic aesthetic is documented in its most extreme form by Surry’s imitation of Keene and the decision by ten Berkshire communities to adopt Bulfinch’s Pittsfield design. It was an urge that pervaded every step taken by virtually every parish or religious society during the two hundred years under consideration. We have also seen that the transmittal of this language followed predictable patterns as it moved from community to community. The first two or three rings of neighboring towns—those within a half-day’s ride—exerted the greatest...