Meetinghouses of Early New England

Built primarily for public religious exercises, New England's wood-frame meetinghouses nevertheless were closely wedded to the social and cultural fabric of the neighborhood and fulfilled multiple secular purposes for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the only municipal building in the community, these structures provided locations for town and parish meetings. They also hosted criminal trials, public punishments and executions, and political and religious protests, and on occasion they served as defensive forts, barracks, hospitals, and places to store gunpowder. Today few of these once ubiquitous buildings survive. Based on site visits and meticulous documentary research, Meetinghouses of Early New England identifies more than 2,200 houses of worship in the region during the period from 1622 to 1830, bringing many of them to light for the first time. Within this framework Peter Benes addresses the stunning but ultimately impermanent blossoming of a New England "vernacular" tradition of ecclesiastical/ municipal architecture. He pinpoints the specific European antecedents of the seventeenth-century New England meetinghouse and traces their evolution through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries into Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches heavily influenced by an Anglican precedent that made a place of worship a "house of God." Undertaking a parish-by-parish examination, Benes draws on primary sources―original records, diaries, and contemporary commentators―to determine which religious societies in the region advocated (or resisted) this evolution, tying key shifts in meetinghouse architecture to the region's shifting liturgical and devotional practices. Built primarily for public religious exercises, New England's wood-frame meetinghouses nevertheless were closely wedded to the social and cultural fabric of the neighborhood and fulfilled multiple secular purposes for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the only municipal building in the community, these structures provided locations for town and parish meetings. They also hosted criminal trials, public punishments and executions, and political and religious protests, and on occasion they served as defensive forts, barracks, hospitals, and places to store gunpowder.Today few of these once ubiquitous buildings survive. Based on site visits and meticulous documentary research, __Meetinghouses of Early New England__ identifies more than 2,200 houses of worship in the region during the period from 1622 to 1830, bringing many of them to light for the first time.Within this framework Peter Benes addresses the stunning but ultimately impermanent blossoming of a New England "vernacular" tradition of ecclesiastical/ municipal architecture. He pinpoints the specific European antecedents of the seventeenth-century New England meetinghouse and traces their evolution through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries into Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches heavily influenced by an Anglican precedent that made a place of worship a "house of God." Undertaking a parish-by-parish examination, Benes draws on primary sources―original records, diaries, and contemporary commentators―to determine which religious societies in the region advocated (or resisted) this evolution, tying key shifts in meetinghouse architecture to the region's shifting liturgical and devotional practices. Cover 1 Contents 6 Title Page 4 Dedication 5 Copyright 5 Introduction: A New England Icon Reconsidered 10 Part I. The Background 20 1. The Meetinghouse and the Community 22 2. The Meetinghouse and the Church 38 3. The Builders 58 4. Seating the Congregation 71 Part II. The Architecture 84 5. Meetinghouses of the Seventeenth Century 86 6. Meetinghouses of the Eighteenth Century 127 7. Meetinghouses of the Early Nineteenth Century 213 Part III. Conclusions 228 8. Some Theoretical Models 230 9. Meetinghouse Architecture as Puritan Ecclesiology 248 10: A Fleeting Image 273 Epilogue 282 Appendix A. Tables 290 Appendix B. Chronological Checklist of Meetinghouses in New England and Long Island, 1622–1830 298 Appendix C. Pinnacles, Pyramids, and Spires, 1651–1709 356 Appendix D. Enlargements of Meetinghouses in New England by Cutting the Frame, 1723–1824 357 Appendix E. Citations of Exterior Painting, 1678–1828 359 Appendix F. Citations of Interior Painting, 1656–1817 368 Appendix G. Meetinghouse Replications in New England, 1647–1828 373 Notes 384 Works Cited 412 Acknowledgments 438 Index 440 About the Author 456 Back Cover 458 Benes, the director of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, has produced a handsome and magisterial volume that will be the definitive study of the meetinghouses of Puritan New England for this generation. Building on earlier work by himself and others, Benes offers not radical reinterpretation but carefully nuanced analysis and synthesis of a mass of information (much of which is tabulated in appendixes). Although focusing on architectural form and detail, the author studies the meetinghouse as a religious, social, and cultural artifact as well as an architectural phenomenon