Meetinghouses of Early New England

4. Seating the Congregation

62 C H A P T E R F O U R Seating the Congregation  The subject that most directly concerned committees in Springfield and Westminster was where the congregation would sit in their new houses of worship . Meetinghouse seating remained one of the most common topics of discussion at New England town and parish meetings for the first two hundred years of the region’s history. Holding seating discussions was no doubt a continuation of past practices in Calvinist churches, especially those in seventeenth-century Scotland.¹ These discussions dealt with issues such as meetinghouse dimensions , the number and placement of galleries, the building of private pews, and access to pews from the outside. They also dealt with rules about measuring the “importance” of families, assigning “dignities” to the seats, providing for infirm, elderly, and deaf parishioners, and selling pews to raise funds for building and repairing the meetinghouse. Between eight hundred and a thousand persons of all ages, ranks, and backgrounds were expected to fit into a forty-by-fifty-foot New England meetinghouse—the most common size before 1790. By Reformed tradition, women were seated on the minister’s left and men on his right, separated by a narrow aisle running the width of the meetinghouse. This practice was followed by the church in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1647 and again in 1655; and according to Ezra Stiles’s memory sketch of the floor plan of the second meetinghouse in New Haven, it was still being followed in the 1750s (fig. 4.1). This segregated tradition was widely observed among Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians , and Quakers in New England before 1770 and among Quakers still at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Some towns reversed these positions. Longmeadow , Massachusetts, for example, arranged for women to sit on the “west side” of the meetinghouse in 1716, suggesting they sat on the minister’s right.² While special places were reserved for visiting strangers or for those who were hearing impaired, each remaining bench and pew was parceled out with great care by a committee assigned for the purpose. The “best” locations were those immediately to the left or the right of the pulpit or directly in front of it at Figure 4.1. Memory drawing by Ezra Stiles of the plan of the second meetinghouse in New Haven, Connecticut, showing the “Position of the Seats & Pews I & my Wife recollected Nov. 13. 1772,” with women on the right and men on the left. This meetinghouse was built by Nathan Andrews in 1668 as a 55-by-35-foot structure. After the width of the meetinghouse was enlarged to 60 feet, the pulpit was centrally located. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 64 Chapter Four the Communion table. Here sat the clergyman and his family; church teachers, deacons, and elders, principal landholders, and important militia officers. The distribution of pews and benches on the sides and far walls, many of them raised up to a foot above the level of the floor, followed an elaborate merit-based system to which every member of the community was expected to adhere.³ Each head of household and his spouse were graded by their importance and assigned to a specific place appropriate to their “dignity.” First-row pews in the gallery, pews near the doorways, and pews on the main aisle went to those with the most dignity ; pews obscured by distance, stairwells, or supporting columns went to those with the least. Well established in sixteenth-century Tudor England, this practice placed wealthy parish residents in pews at the front, while the poor sat on benches at the rear.⁴ In New England, these assignments were posted on a seating chart (fig. 4.2), a sheet usually nailed to the entrance of the meetinghouse, which subjected the community to a periodic review of individual worth unmatched for its frankness. To handle enforcement, each town appointed tithingmen— a type of meetinghouse police that one historian calls “grotesque” and “most Figure 4.2. Ground-floor pew plan of the third meetinghouse in Wenham, Massachusetts, early nineteenth century. Built in 1748, the meetinghouse dimensions were 52 by 42 feet; stairs to the gallery are visible in the upper left near the east door. Wenham Museum Collection, Wenham, Massachusetts. Seating the Congregation 65 extraordinary”—to be in charge of security and decency.⁵ Largely ineffectual, the office of tithingman nevertheless was a required duty...