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Introduction: A New England Icon Reconsidered
- University of Massachusetts Press
- Chapter
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1 I N T ROD UCT ION A New England Icon Reconsidered The New England meetinghouse has long held a place in the American imagination as a cultural and historical icon. Meetinghouses have stood for the community. They have enshrined traditional New England religious values. They have been a symbol of permanence, stability, democracy, and religious reform. From their belfries could be seen the spires of meetinghouses in adjoining parishes, a metaphorical link to an orderly network of “primitive” Christian communities and a visual link to the Baroque and Italianate taste of English architects, such as Christopher Wren and James Gibbs. The meetinghouse bell, the emblematic center of each community, summoned parishioners to the Sabbath meeting, marked days of fasting and thanksgiving, accompanied funerals, and warned of emergencies. These iconic features were eulogized by nineteenthcentury New England parish and town historians—that wonderful generation of storytellers who loved to inform their readers that, as children, they were filled alternately with terror and hope that the sounding board would fall on the minister’s head and that the dropping of hinged pew seats sounded to them like the rattle of musket fire.¹ A closer look at the evidence suggests that many of these ideas are unfounded or only partly true. The builders of most New England meetinghouses, for example , saw them as temporary structures; many had not even been completed when they were taken down and replaced by a larger one. And a widespread pattern of neighborly and sectarian rivalry challenges the notion that meetinghouses represented community stability. At least thirteen recorded instances are known when one faction of “aggrieved” neighbors stole, burned, or cut in half the principal timbers of a meetinghouse on the night before its scheduled raising, hoping to see it relocated to a more desirable location.² One such faction so diverted the workers that a large section of the frame fell, injuring several people.³ Sectarian controversies were equally confrontational. In the 1790s Congregationalists and Baptists in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, vying for control of the town’s meetinghouse, precipitated what historians later called the “longest meeting” ever held in New England—a day-and-night takeover by outnumbered Baptist elders and members of their congregation who lectured, read, sang, and exhorted in a continual chain of exercises designed to prevent the Congregational minister from preaching. After two weeks the exhausted Baptists left the building. They subsequently lost in court.⁴ In the same decade the town of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, was called together ninety-nine times in a failed effort to site a proposed meetinghouse; the debates became so acrimonious that audiences from neighboring towns “flocked” to the meetings to watch the proceedings.⁵ Were meetinghouses democratic institutions? Inequality, gender bias, and social control were built into every step of the parish system. Committees, always made up of landed Caucasian men, monitored virtually every social interaction. One committee separated the community into ranks of importance by assessing age, estate, and parentage; a second committee divided the meetinghouse into descending levels of “dignities”; a third committee decided where each individual would sit, assigning pews like a grade-school seating chart; and a fourth spelled out the exiting precedence to be followed when the service was over. And as for bells and English architects, relatively few New Englanders heard bells before 1800, and only one steeple in the region (the 1775 First Baptist meetinghouse in Providence) is known to have actually been copied from an English architect’s design. Most parishioners were summoned to the religious service by a raised red flag, the beat of a drum, or the sound of a conch or trumpet. The term meetinghouse first occurs in written usage in March 1632 in the journal of Massachusetts governor John Winthrop (1588–1649), who alludes to the “new meeting house” at Dorchester whose thatch had been blackened by a small explosion of powder.⁶ By “meeting house” he meant little more than the structure that had recently been erected in that town for the purpose of holding public meetings and church services. The term was significant to him and many others in the new Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay because implied in its use was a definition of church. To the members of the Church of England, who largely remained behind in England during the initial migration to Massachusetts and Connecticut, a church was an ecclesiological and architectural reality—a sacred building for worship with all the accompanying texts, vestments, surplices , calendars, rituals, prayer books, and organs that de...