University of Dallas

Sanctity of Place:

The Development of Puritan Religious Architecture in America

A thesis submitted to the Department of History

By

Lori Renee Pastor

December 2002

To Grandma B.

Contents

2

List of Illustrations…………………………………………………………………. 4

Chapter

1. From the Old World to the “American Desart”………………………… 5

2. The Puritan Meetinghouse……………………………………………… 12

3. The Transitional Meetinghouse………………………………………… 23

4. The Congregational Church…………………………………………….. 37

5. The Meetinghouse and the Church in Logical Continuum……………... 49

Selected Bibliography………………………………………………………………. 55

Illustrations

3

Figure Page

1. Old Ship Meetinghouse, Hingham, Massachusetts, 1681..…………………… 14

2. Old Ship Meetinghouse, Hingham, Massachusetts, 1681………………..…… 15

3. Rocky Hill Meetinghouse, Amesbury, Massachusetts, 1716, 1785…………... 16

4. Rocky Hill Meetinghouse, Amesbury, Massachusetts, 1716, 1785…………... 16

5. Old South Meetinghouse, Boston, Massachusetts, 1730……………………... 27

6. Old South Meetinghouse, Boston, Massachusetts, 1730……………………… 28

7. Old North Church, Boston, Massachusetts, 1723…………………………….. 29

8. Old North Church, Boston, Massachusetts, 1723…………………………….. 29

9. St. James Church, London, England, 1687…………………………………… 30

10. Farmington Meetinghouse, Farmington, Connecticut, 1771………………… 31

11. Pittsfield Congregational Church, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 1789…….……. 39

12. Taunton Congregational Church, Taunton, Massachusetts, 1830…………… 39

13. “Design for a Church,” from The Country Builder’s Assistant, 1797………... 40

14. “Design for a Church,” from The Country Builder’s Assistant, 1797………... 40

15. Lee Congregational Church, Lee, Massachusetts, 1793…………………….… 41

16. Center Congregational Church, New Haven, Connecticut, 1814…………….. 41

17. First Congregational Church of Litchfield, Connecticut, 1829, 1929………... 45

Chapter 1

4

From the Old World to the “American Desart”

In 1630, an English ship called the Arbella landed on a deserted coastline. The

weary passengers in its hold were not adventurers, and few could call themselves

experienced travelers. The voyagers were not commissioned by a European crown to

search for the riches of the New World. Although this was the first time their eyes met

the shore, they were not the first to see it. Indeed, they had no notion of future hardships

or prosperity yet to come on this land. They had a different type of vision. These tired

travelers were English Puritans. They were searching not for cities but for virgin

wilderness to settle. They had no throng to greet them, but that is what they expected and

what they desired.

One of the Puritan passengers in the Arbella’s hold was John Winthrop, who,

during the voyage, had delivered a lay sermon entitled “A Model of Christian Charity.”

“We must consider,” said he,

that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. 1

The Puritans planned to build their new “City” in this land, erected for the entire world to

see and judge. They planned to construct it with care, following the simple

commandment to obey only Him: Winthrop says, after all, that He is “our life, and our

prosperity.”2 If they should fail, the world would dismiss their attempts. If they should

build their City on the solid ground of faith and obedience, the shifting sands of time

would never efface their triumphant endeavors.

1 John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649, eds. Richard S. Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 10.2 Winthrop, 11.

5

Seventy-two years after the Arbella landed, Cotton Mather published Magnalia

Christi Americana, in which he declared that the unconquered wilderness, the “American

Desart [sic],” had offered her bosom to the “Thousands of Reformers,” the Puritans.3

Their “American Desart” was certainly, in one sense, a blank slate; the “Reformers” had

the opportunity to fill the void with their own moral universe. As Winthrop suggested,

they would build their City as a beacon to the world, founded on their principles. The

New World had the potential to be the New Jerusalem just as it could become the new

Sodom and Gomorrah. If the Puritans did not build their City on the foundations of

God’s Word, it would become a by-word and a joke. Those who stepped off the Arbella,

those who arrived later, and those who were born in the “Desart,” such as Cotton Mather,

thus justified their presence in a strange land in eschatological terms. This new place was

the end. Empty of European religion, here the Puritans could build the ultimate City of

God.

The Puritans did not see themselves as free of the vices of the rest of the Christian

world. On the contrary, they were all too aware of the faults and sins that in their turn

drew them away from the Promised Land. Their self-consciousness about their mission,

in other words, did not obstruct the view they had of themselves as sinners.4 The

jeremiads of the second and third generations were not without their roots in this past

tradition of zealous self-scrutiny. When the Puritans stepped on the shores of modern-

day Massachusetts they approached their mission as sinners, with flaws and faults. They

never claimed that their City was of divine origins; like all things human, it could fall to

3 Cotton Mather, a selection from Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England, in Early American Writing, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 260.4 Winthrop, 263-345. John Winthrop’s third journal details the sins of the American settlers in and around Boston. This certainly suggests that, although the Puritans were aware of their self-proclaimed mission, they did not shut their eyes to that which needed reforming in themselves.

6

temptation and sin. The Puritans, and the cities they would build, made no pretensions to

perfection. They believed that they could create the better—not the perfect—while

avoiding a recreation of the old. As Mather states, they were “Reformers.” They were

English Calvinists, part of Reformed Protestantism, but they also planned to reform and

rebuild what they knew into the City of God. Their City reflected the Puritan spirit of

newness, of self-awareness, and of mission; however, the Puritans did not completely

eschew every aspect of life as they had known it before. They wanted to reform and

rebuild the old.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans had a clear picture of the forms their

reformed City would not take. They wished to improve the theology and philosophy they

knew from previous European experience. Their beliefs found expression in the way

they approached the world—their sense of mission and reform, for example. Moreover,

their urge to build an exemplary City extended from the realm of the idea, from the

written and the thought, to the physical realities of the world. The Puritans quite literally

built their “City” with their eyes on the actual foundations, and they focused on the

structure of their central meeting place. In England, the Puritans often gathered in homes

or abandoned buildings; in some cases, they refurbished Catholic churches or borrowed

Jewish synagogues. The New World thus offered a unique opportunity. On its shores,

the Puritans could build their City. They effectively had a clean slate onto which they

could impose their religion, their eschatological purpose, and the architecture that

corresponded to these ideas. The Puritans could literally build gathering places from the

ground up. 5

5 Thomas Mowl and Brian Earnshaw, Architecture without Kings: The Rise of Puritan Classicism under Cromwell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 7-8, 17. Not until the English Civil War would structures built as Puritan gathering places begin appearing in England. Even then, the Puritan structures were almost indistinguishable from Roman Catholic and Anglican religious structures. Perhaps,

7

Unfortunately, neither Winthrop nor any other Puritan came to the new settlement

with explicit instructions on building places of gathering. Indeed, they did not come with

building instructions for any type of construction. All of their first structures were

therefore rough and temporary, providing shelter and little else. As more permanent

structures took shape on the landscape, the Puritans began constructing communal

gathering places. Indeed, the frame construction used by the Puritans to construct their

homes became the conceptual blueprint used to build their gathering places. These

places, called meetinghouses, were just what the name implied—a house for meeting.

Indeed, Cotton Mather exclaimed that there was “no just ground in Scripture to apply

such a trope as church to a place of assembly.”6 The name of this place implied that the

meeting itself, and not the external appearance, was important.

The meetinghouse façade, therefore, appeared much like a larger version of the

houses that surrounded it. The dimensions of the meetinghouse were often square or

slightly rectangular, similar to a Puritan house. The Old Ship Meetinghouse of Hingham,

Massachusetts, for example, was constructed in 1681 with the dimensions of 45 by 55

feet with twenty-foot posts. Like other early meetinghouse, it had a hipped roof and

windows on each level.7 Meetinghouse builders inserted doors on three sides of these

structures and, if so inclined, painted the structure a shade of yellow, brown, or red.8

as Mowl and Earnshaw suggest, this was because the primary architect at that time, Inigo Jones, had a distinct style that he applied indiscriminately to all his designs. Moreover, the disparate architecture between the English and Massachussets Bay Colony Puritans enhanced their increasing theological differences. 6 Cotton Mather, quoted in Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Meetinghouse Hill (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1972), 50.7 Hugh Morrison, Early American Architecture: From the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period (New York: Dover Publications, 1987), 80-81.8 Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 337. Francis Underwood, visiting the Quabbin, Massachusetts meetinghouse, noted that it was painted a “dingy sulphur [sic] color” before transforming into the New England stereotype: a bright white structure with green shutters.

8

The meetinghouse interior also apparently rejected any hint of sanctity.

Disdaining extraneous ornamentation, Puritans preferred a simple space with one focus.

The focal point of the Puritan meeting and Puritan theology was always the Word of

God; therefore, the pulpit took the foreground, and the seating encircled the pulpit on

three sides. At the front of the pulpit, facing the congregation, elders and deacons sat on

straight-backed benches on either side of a flip-down communion table. Families and

those deemed most important to the community sat in benches on the first level. The

young and the unmarried occupied the galleries on the second level. Light flooded the

interior, as windows—sans stained glass panes—encircled the entire structure. One or

two large windows hung above the pulpit, immediately below a sounding board.9

The Puritan meetinghouse architecture of the seventeenth and early eighteenth

centuries thus revealed the Puritan preoccupation with plainness. Constructed like large,

communal houses, each community built their gathering place in the same simple

fashion, with few regional variations. These first meetinghouses matched Puritan denial

of superfluous ornamentation. Yet, the obsessive simplicity that marked the early

meetinghouses did not extend into the following two centuries. Rather, Puritans

throughout New England enhanced their places of worship with box pews, cornices,

bells, and most significantly, elaborate towers and spires. The dimensions shifted from

square to rectangular, and the interior became nave-like.10 As Anglican parishes grew in

number, so did the Georgian architectural influence of their churches: towers topped with

spires began appearing on meetinghouses throughout Massachusetts.11 The Puritans

seemingly came to embrace the architecture they had once eschewed. The Puritan 9 Edmund W. Sinnott, Meeting House and Church Architecture in Early New England (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1963), 16.10 Sinnott, 19.11 Sinnott, 25-26.

9

meetinghouse, a simple place of gathering, became the Puritan church, a place of

worship.

Why did this happen? How, exactly, did the Puritans come to accept and to

welcome architectural developments that seemed contradictory to the designs of the first

settlers? Their churches were the refined sites of theatrical showcases of congregational

gentility. The fear of idolatry was tempered by one hundred years of stiff benches and

cold mornings. Or was it? Did the Puritans merely fatigue themselves in their intense

rejection of ornamentation and comfort? Was the temptation of eighteenth-century

economic success too great for even the staunchest Puritans? Modifying this question of

why the Puritan meetinghouse became the Puritan church is essential. I would like to

suggest that the more fundamental question is this: were the later Puritan churches

actually part of a logical continuum in Puritan theology and architecture? In other words,

were the architectural changes truly representative of extreme shifts in deep-seated

religious belief? Or did a connection of some sort exist between the architecture of the

meetinghouse and the first Puritan church?

The early meetinghouses were certainly plain. Cotton Mather himself scorned

traditional church architecture. Even the appellation “meetinghouse” rejected any notion

of sanctity of place. However, I posit that the plainness—the very absence of intentional

symbolism—was, indeed, symbolic of the Puritan religious belief in unfettered praise of

God. The Word of God was central, and the pulpit, not an altar, remained central to

Puritan meetinghouse and church. By 1800, the dimensions of the meetinghouse grew

longer, and steeple bells rang the congregations to regular Sunday-morning church

service. Nevertheless, the symbolism of plainness in the Puritan meetinghouse did not

10

disappear with the introduction of the Puritan church and its “theatrical gaudiness.” If

anything, the challenge to original simplicity gave rise to articulations on symbolism and

its appropriate use in a place of gathering. The creation of the Puritan church merely

iterated the incipient symbolism of plainness.

The history of Puritan meetinghouse and church architecture depends on tracing

the development of this symbolism of plainness, dependent on the architectural and

theological idea of the central pulpit. In order to focus my study of the Puritan concept of

sanctity of place, I will concentrate on the development of Puritan meetinghouse and

church architecture in the Massachusetts Bay Colony as well as Connecticut. The

Separatist settlements of Plymouth are no less important to my study. While recognizing

that the Separatists wanted to separate from the Anglican Chuch and the Puritans proper

wanted to “purify” it, the two both became part of a Congregational heritage. To

simplify my account, I will focus less on the division between the two Congregationalist

groups and more on their shared architectural heritage. I will also emphasize the origins

and development of the architecture from the Puritan perspective. Thus I begin on June

17, 1630, the day the Arbella, the first Puritan ship to the New World, made landfall.

Chapter 2

The Puritan Meetinghouse

On board the Arbella were the first Puritan settlers of Massachusetts and all the

belongings they could afford to bring. A list from 1630 recommended the

“PROPORTION OF PROVISIONS NEEDFVLL FOR SVCH AS INTEND TO PLANT

themselves in New-England, for one whole yeare”:

11

For Building: Nayles of all sorts.Lockes for Doores and chests.Gimmowes for Chests.Hookes and twists for doores.12

These tools represented the Puritans’ European origins. Before even beginning to build

their first permanent structures, the Puritans had anticipated using English tools and

supplies to rebuild English structures on the shores of the New World. In keeping with

the familiar ways of construction and living and their adamant rejection of church

architecture, the Puritans constructed meetinghouses using English building techniques

for secular homes. Therefore, the first permanent meetinghouses resembled English

domestic architecture.

These meetinghouses mimicked the wattle-and-daub construction of the Puritan

home.13 Thin wooden strips, held together with clay or plaster, were interwoven with the

frame of the house. The Puritans then nailed unpainted weatherboards to the posts and

studs that held the wall filling in place. The settlers soon learned that the imported ideas

of building structure left much to be desired in their new habitat. The winters, in

particular, were colder than any they had known in England. The native inhabitants,

having more experience with cold New England winters and the benefits of multifamily

living than the European newcomers, built warm and efficient structures. Instead of

adopting the energy-efficient and time-proven styles of native architecture, however, the

settlers continued to build from their own experience and familiar English culture,

modifying it as needed.14

12 “Massachusetts Bay ‘Provision List,’” Plimoth-on-Web, http://www.plimoth.org/Library/massprov.htm, 13 November 2002.13 Morrison, 15. 14 John Burchard and Albert Bush-Brown, The Architecture of America: A Social and Cultural History (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1961), 57.

12

The English Puritans in Massachusetts looked to their familiar traditions for

inspiration, but they turned to the land of the American wilderness for building materials.

Existing in abundance, wood, primarily oak, soon became the building material of choice

throughout New England. Huge, hand-hewn timbers were common well into the

nineteenth century.15 The Puritans transformed these rough timbers into ten different

types of framing timbers. Joints attached the horizontal timbers (sills on the ground

flood, girts on the upper floor, and plates to support the timbers) to the vertical timbers

(posts) of the frame. The joints employed by most colonists in New England were of

mortise-and-tenon construction. The tenon, or small wooden sleeve of one timber, fit in

the mortise, a carved-out indentation of the other timber, and a wooden pin inserted into

the timbers at the joint held the two timbers together.

Puritans instituted “raising bees” to raise quickly and easily the frame of a large

meetinghouse. For weeks beforehand, colonial men laid the foundation and carved out

the intricate joints and fittings of the frame. The frame was divided into halves and laid

flat on the ground. On the day of the raising, women prepared refreshments, and two

gangs of men using long pikes hoisted the frame into the air. The two halves slowly

came together to form a whole frame, with one man sitting on the large connective beam

or “plate” as it rose into place.16 Once the skeleton was standing, the men then installed

the various boards for the floors, walls, and roof.17 The Puritans, with few exceptions,

held fast to this raising process for the building of meetinghouses until the late eighteenth

century.

15 Morrison, 22.16 Sinnott, 101. The process of sitting on the plate as it rose is called “riding the plate.” Surprisingly, the refreshments were often alcoholic. Sinnott tells an amusing anecdote concerning the “rider” of Milford Church in Massachusetts. Instead of the traditional gulping-down of rum after riding the plate to its position, this particular church member led those below in a solemn rendition of the Doxology.17 Morrison, 22-8

13

Fig. 1. Old Ship Meetinghouse, Hingham, Massachusetts, 1681. From The Old Ship Meetinghouse, http://www.oldshipchurch.org/ The original entrance was located behind the more recent addition at the front of the meetinghouse.

Fig. 2. Old Ship Meetinghouse pulpit, Hingham, Massachusetts, 1681. From Sinnott, Meetinghouse and Church Architecture in Early New England, 205.

The construction of the meetinghouse, then, resembled the construction of the

houses that surrounded it. Several attributes of the meetinghouse’s exterior appearance,

however, distinguished it as a

gathering place, or, at the least, as a

place other than large home. Unlike

the simpler Puritan homes, the

meetinghouse was two-storied, a

row of windows corresponding to

each story. On the northern side of

the meetinghouse, one or two large

windows broke the pattern of rows.

Three entrances led the way into the meetinghouse, although the south entrance, opposite

the one large window, was often the primary one. A hipped roof topped the

meetinghouse,18 and later congregations often voted to add a small belfry or cupola. The

Old Ship Meetinghouse of Hingham, Massachusetts, dating to 1681 (apart from the more

recent additions), is a case in point. Painted a dull yellow, it resembled, not the churches

of seventeenth-century England, but a large

communal structure, obviously not a church, and

probably something more than a home (Fig. 1).

Rather than create an inconspicuous place

of gathering, the Puritans set the meetinghouse

apart through its size and number of windows

18 Peter W. Williams, Houses of God: Region, Religion, and Architecture in The United States (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 7.

14

Fig. 3. Rocky Hill Meetinghouse, Amesbury, Massachusetts, 1716, 1785. From Rose, The Colonial Houses of Worship in America, 237. The front addition and Georgian detail (the roofline dental work and columns surrounding the doors) are 1785 designs and therefore do not fit the early meetinghouse type.

and doors. Even as the Puritans refused to follow the standards of traditional religious

architecture, they created their own separate tradition. The meetinghouse exterior hints

of this, but nowhere is a new Puritan architectural design more obvious than in the

meetinghouse interior. Keith Sprunger calls the interior plan of the meetinghouse the

“trinity” of Puritan architecture: the bench, the table, and the pulpit.19 Sprunger argues

that this plan developed during the temporary Separatist settlement in Leiden; the Puritan

meetinghouses in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, however, also included the basic

tripartite plan. The interior of the Old Ship Meetinghouse followed this design. Benches,

later pews, lined the lower level. Galleries, held up by wooden posts, ran on each side

except the pulpit wall and provided additional seating for the congregation. Above all

this came the assumed namesake of the church: a massive, hull-like ceiling, exposed to

the beams. By far the most striking feature of the interior was the pulpit. Topped with a

sounding board for acoustical purposes, and perhaps to emphasize its central importance,

two “pulpit windows” lit the northern end of the meetinghouse. The communion table

was not immediately obvious, as it was a small, flip-down table on the front of the pulpit

(Fig. 2).20

In effect, the congregation of Old Ship—and all the early meetinghouses—

architecturally seemed to shun sanctity of place. The Puritans constructed the exteriors of

the first meetinghouses as large houses and the interior furnishings as rejections of the

familiar arrangement of a church. Cotton Mather exclaimed that the “setting of these

19 Keith Sprunger, “Puritan Church Architecture and Worship in a Dutch Context,” Church History 66 (1997), 44.20 Sinnott, 32-33.

15

Fig. 4. Rocky Hill Meetinghouse interior, Amesbury, MA 1716, 1785. From Rose, The Colonial Houses of Worship in America, 237. The marbleized columns are distinct to the 1785 rebuilding.

places off with a theatrical gaudiness does not savor of the spirit of a true Christian

society.”21 Disdaining any notion of ornamentation or “theatrical gaudiness,” Puritans

preferred to focus attention on the preached Word. As the focus of the Puritan meeting

was always the Word of God, the pulpit took the foreground. The Puritans, observed the

Lord’s Supper as a memorial, and the communion table brought out only occasionally.22

In many meetinghouses, such as Old Ship, the communion table was simply an

attachment to the altar. The preached Word was the connective force between God and

His people: the pulpit, not the altar, was the physical representation of this connection.23

Because Puritans placed such an emphasis on the preached Word of God, the

interior of the meetinghouse resembled an auditorium, the seating surrounding the pulpit.

So crucial was the Scripture reading and corresponding sermon that some meetinghouses,

once box pews became popular after the turn of the eighteenth century, installed small

armrests on which the head of the household could take notes.24 The Rocky Hill

Meetinghouse in Amesbury, Massachusetts, built in 1716 and rebuilt in 1785, included an

armrest in every pew (Figs. 3 & 4). While this meetinghouse includes elements

belonging to the transitional stage,25 the focalization of the pulpit and the Word of God is

obvious in the interior architecture. Rocky Hill Meetinghouse, consequently, parallels

the architecture of Old Ship Meetinghouse to a certain degree. In both meetinghouses,

with the exception of the imposing pulpit, the most extraordinary elements of the interior

were the windows. No wall was without two rows of windows, and the pulpit was

21 Cotton Mather, quoted in Morrison, 79.22 Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 391.23 Williams, 6.24 Sinnott, 55.25 See also p. 23.

16

completely illuminated by at least one.26 The presence of these clear panes, which made

light available in order to read Scripture, implied a certain symbolism. Condemning

ornamentation, “idols,” and images, the Puritan insistence on windows, especially above

the pulpit, suggested that they were nonetheless creating an architectural statement of

their faith. Knowledge of the Scripture provided illumination; what better way to

represent this architecturally than through windows?

Nonetheless, the Puritan settlers ideologically rejected any notion of sanctity of

space. They also denied that any time was especially holy. Reformed Protestants were

uneasy with scheduled times and places for worship: these designated times and places

became a cast for Christians in which to mold themselves to fit unthinkingly. All days,

they claimed, were equally holy. This rendered Sunday worship, even weekly worship,

unnecessary, and worship became linked to spontaneous and providential events.

Indeed, ministers called days of prayer or meeting on providential days or days of

thanksgiving so often, that the Colonial Court agreed to limit these days.27 However, in

practice, the Puritans participated in weekly Sunday and Thursday services. The

Puritans’ everyday reality seemed to suggest something more complicated than a simple,

flat, ideological denial. James Walsh, in an article on Puritan conceptions of time and

space, states that Puritan worship “reacted most enthusiastically to the present and

constant activity of the living God, who was to be always and everywhere adored.”28 No

one time, no one space was more holy than they next. Yet, in a defense of the Puritan

idea of worship, the Rev. Thomas Shepard stated that “‘it is true that every day,

26 Sinnott, 16.27 James P. Walsh, “Holy Time and Sacred Space in Puritan New England,” American Quarterly 32 (Spring 1980), 80-84. John Norton, for example, wrote in 1645 that “the material for prayers...is always freshly arriving.”28 Walsh, 84, emphasis added.

17

considered, materially and physically, is equally holy,’ but they were not ‘morally and

theologically holy’ to the same degree.”29 Weekly worship, he concluded, was practically

necessary.

Just as Puritan ideology and Puritan practice diverged on the issue of time, Puritan

ideology concerning space differed from the everyday reality experienced by the

Puritans. Walsh explains that Puritanism rested on a strong ideological foundation, but

not everything in their world was ideological. Some things were simple reality. The

Puritans, as a people with the daunting task of creating a “City upon a Hill,”

invariably expressed their sense of value in religious terms and tended to magnify differences between things into an opposition of sacred and profane. As a result, they created, on the level of everyday reality, a time and space as unevenly sacred as that which their ideology denied.30

This meetinghouse, built in rejection of traditional religious architecture, was a part of the

Puritan dichotomy between “ideology” and “reality,” to borrow Walsh’s terms.

Ideologically, the Puritan meetinghouse was not a particularly sacred place; nor was it a

neutral space. The meetinghouse was a space like any other: God existed everywhere

and in all time, and should therefore be praised everywhere and at all time. The Puritans

refused to allow their meetinghouse any special status as a religious space, holding

Sunday and Thursday meetings as well as town meetings there. Until well after the

American Revolution, the meetinghouse continued its role as primary meeting place, no

matter if a preacher led the meeting on a Sunday or if the town council led a meeting on

Monday.31 Yet, the meetinghouse was not a secular space—God was everywhere.

Neither was the meetinghouse a religious space—again, God was everywhere. In effect,

29 Reverend Thomas Shepard, quoted in Walsh, 83.30 Walsh, 88.31 Sinnott, 82-83.

18

the Puritans refused the division between secular and religious represented by Catholic

and Anglican churches.

However, the Puritans themselves introduced a division between religious and

secular in their everyday lives (Walsh’s “reality”). Puritan prayer ideologically could and

should be done everywhere and at all times, but many Puritans felt prayer was best when

alone and in a certain spot, a “closet.” Cotton Mather prayed alone in his study. Indeed,

he became convinced, after ministering in his home to a girl possessed by demons, that

these demons could wander about freely but could not enter into his study. Jonathan

Edwards himself prayed alone in the woods. Walsh contends, however, that the next

natural step was to sanctify the place of communal prayer, the meetinghouse.

Ideologically, the meetinghouse was no more sacred than the rest of God’s world. Yet

from the beginning, the Puritans had designated the meetinghouse as a place like no

other. Geographically, the meetinghouse occupied the center-most plot of land.32 The

entire community built the structure, they were required by law to attend all obligatory

services, and they gathered in its walls to discuss colonial politics.33 The Puritans truly

used the space as the one communal space in which to gather for every communal affair:

social, political, religious. In practice, however, the Puritans made the meetinghouse an

“axis mundi,” a place at which the cosmic realm opened to human reality. 34 The door

through which the Puritan’s reality encountered the divine presence was the pulpit,

reached by a stairway and surrounded by windows. The Puritans’ “communal closet,” so

to speak, was the meetinghouse, and the Word of God, as spoken from the pulpit, was

central in connecting the human and divine experience.

32 Walsh, 90-91.33 Sinnott, 6-7.34 Walsh, 89.

19

The Puritan’s conception of their meetinghouse was two-fold. When they began

constructing their gathering places, they refused the concept of “church.” The

meetinghouse was not sacred or profane, but as sanctified as the rest of God’s creation.

The Puritans therefore constructed their meetinghouses in the building traditional with

which they were most familiar—secular and English. They built with the materials at

hand, wood and clay, and painted their meetinghouses the colors of the nature they saw

around them. The meetinghouse was a large, all-purpose, communal structure. Yet the

Puritan communities of Massachusetts used this gathering place as a religious structure.

Just as Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards chose particular places in which they could

communicate with God, the meetinghouse was the community-chosen space in which the

Word of God could be spoken and heard. It was the entrance from the human to the

divine, the architectural connection between two worlds. In order to feel the connection

between God and man, in order to communicate fully, the Puritans created a place in

which to worship. They sanctified what was, in their ideology, the unsanctifiable.

The Puritans, even while denying the sanctity of place and refusing to build

“churches,” demonstrated that the meetinghouse was something more than a communal

house or a simple town hall. After constructing the meetinghouse, Puritans regularly

crowded within its walls to hear the Word of God. They went no other place to meet in

fellowship with each other and, at the same time, with God.35 This structure seemed to

correspond to Puritan ideology and reality: apparently freed from “theatrical gaudiness,”

it was, in any case, physically designated as a place unlike any other. It was the largest,

most central building, with two stories and more windows than any other building. 35 Anne Hutchinson and later Jonathan Edwards most famously did not worship in a meetinghouse setting; the former gathered people to her home, the latter often preached and prayed outdoors. The Bay Colony court, however, did not find Hutchinson’s meetings legitimate gatherings. Edwards’ outdoors meetings will be treated in the following chapters.

20

However, the meetinghouse would not always remain in this tension between ideology

and reality. The Puritans would, in time, create a church.

21

Chapter 3

The Transitional Meetinghouse

In Chapter Two, I proposed that the Puritan meetinghouse was similar to a large

Puritan home. Building with the principles of English construction in mind, the Puritans

deliberately rejected any apparent resemblance to European religious architecture. No

stained glass windows, no tall steeple or spire, suggested that this place was a religious

structure. Indeed, even the entrances suggested a conscious denial of anything Catholic

or Anglican. While traditional structures positioned the altar toward the East, the

direction from which Christ would return, the Puritan meetinghouse placed its main

entrance on the south side.36 The meetinghouse was neither sacred nor sanctified, but a

place of gathering. God was not in the architectural details, but in the very Word spoken

within the walls. These words, not the walls, were the focus.

I also suggested that the tension between Puritan ideology and practice, worked

out through meetinghouse architecture and its use, would not exist indefinitely. While

the Puritans believed that no time or place was more sacred than the next, in practice,

they used a particular building, the meetinghouse, to gather on every Sunday. The

architecture itself suggested that, while not a traditional church, the meetinghouse was, at

the least, a communal place of interest. The number of widows, the number of doors, and

its sheer size characterized the meetinghouse as an important place. Walsh’s premise that

the Puritans separated ideology and practice has been the basis for my argument: the

Puritans, while building these non-sacred and non-secular meetinghouses, were

nonetheless creating a religious structure, albeit one of a new genre. This place housed

36 Williams, 7.

22

the pulpit, and it was to this place that Puritans were obliged to gather to hear the Word

of God spoken. The meetinghouse was the communal axis mundi.

No matter what the religious service the meetinghouse provided to the

seventeenth-century Puritans, the structure was an untraditional expression of religious

belief. As the Puritans came to Massachusetts without written or drawn meetinghouse

plans, they built without the use of such plans, and few written or drawn descriptions

remain of the meetinghouse. The Reverend J. S. Popkins left one of the few written

accounts of the meetinghouse. At the turn of the eighteenth century, he composed a brief

but thorough description of the interior of the Newbury, Massachusetts, Meetinghouse:

The body was filled with long seats. Contiguous to the wall were twenty pews. The spaces for the pews were granted to particular persons who appear to have been principals. Before the pulpit and deacons’ seat was a large pew containing a table where sat the chiefs of the fathers. The young people sat in the upper gallery, and the children on a seat in the alley fixed to the outside of the pews. The floor measured 60 feet by 50 feet. The roof was constructed with four gable ends or projections, one on each side, each containing a large window which gave light to the upper galleries. The turret was on the center. The space within was open to the roof, where was visible plenty of timber with great needles and little needles pointing downwards which served at once for strength and ornament. There were many ornaments of antique sculpture and wainscot. It was a stately building in the day of it.37

Rev. Popkins’ description is consistent with the architecture of the Old Ship

Meetinghouse, my exemplary structure for the early meetinghouse type. The dimensions

are nearly square, and the “the turret was in the center”: the Newbury Meetinghouse had,

like the Old Ship Meetinghouse, a turret or cupola centrally located on the roof. The roof

also revealed the meetinghouse character of the Newbury Meetinghouse. It was not steep

and two-sided, but was a hipped roof design (“four gabled ends”). Finally, the roof

37 Sinnott, 31-32, emphasis added.

23

beams were uncovered by a drop ceiling; at the turn of the nineteenth century, many

congregations “improved” the interior by installing a false ceiling below the beams.

Although the actual construction of the meetinghouse was still in keeping with the

square, hipped-roof design, a few interior features revealed that many Puritans had

gathered within its walls by the time of Popkins’ writing. He states, for example, that

pews ran contiguous to the walls; the Newbury congregation had already adopted more

comfortable pews in favor of benches. Popkins’ last comments are intriguing, and lend

support to the assertion that, even as he is writing, the meetinghouse style is undergoing

dramatic change. The “needles” holding the beams in the ceiling are not only for holding

the beams in the ceiling—to Popkins, they are ornamental. The meetinghouse is also

decorated with “antique sculpture and wainscoting.” Popkins suggests that the simplicity

of the church lends, albeit a bit quaintly, to its stateliness. While his last statement

indicates that this meetinghouse is old enough to be somewhat outmoded, he still claims,

“It was a stately building in the day of it.” Like the Old Ship Meetinghouse, the

Newbury Meetinghouse insisted on the primacy of the Word in its interior design. The

positioning of the pews and existence of upper galleries stresses the centering of the

service on the spoken Word. Nonetheless, this meetinghouse was changing, and its very

distinctiveness as an unstately place was changing, as well.

More and more, observers such as Popkins smiled at the old-fashioned simplicity

of the plain design. Stately in its time, the meetinghouse became a vestige of an older

generation. The Newbury meetinghouse seemed to be adopting the movement toward

increased architectural elaboration and a shifting type of design. The frame of the old

meetinghouse was still there: the dimensions were square, the roof was hipped, and the

24

beams were exposed. Yet the Newbury Meetinghouse was assuming some of the

“theatrical gaudiness” once flatly rejected by Puritans. The sculpture and the wainscot

were two steps on the way to a new style of meetinghouse. The Rocky Hill

Meetinghouse in Amesbury, Massachusetts, was another example of the shifting design:

while sharing definite similarities to the Old Ship Meetinghouse, Rocky Hill also adopted

wainscot and a two-sided roof. Moreover, the Rocky Hill Meetinghouse revealed an

increasing tendency toward rectangular design. By the 1720s, congregations in

Massachusetts and Connecticut, including the Newbury and Rocky Hill congregation,

began to change the actual design of their meetinghouses. Rather than a square, hipped-

roof structure, with a central cupola or turret, the meetinghouse became an overtly

rectangular structure with a steeper, two-sided roof and, usually, with a tower on one end.

These transitional structures38 did not reject meetinghouse design; indeed, common

architectural threads run through all of Puritan design. Nonetheless, the eighteenth-

century meetinghouse was the bridge to the nineteenth century church.

In Boston, the Old South Meetinghouse, designed by Robert Twelves and built by

Joshua Blanchard from 1729-1730, followed the transitional plan. Like the first

meetinghouses, the Old South congregation, officially called the Third Church of Boston,

used the building as a type of communal center, not confining its use to Sundays and the

occasional weekday gathering.39 Indeed, the Old South Meetinghouse was larger than

38 Sinnott, 211. Sinnott uses a framework of four phases in order to classify meetinghouse and church types: Type I is the meetinghouse as it existed before 1700; Type II is the structure built from 1710 to 1800; Type III is the church design prevalent between 1800 and 1825; and Type IV is the Greek Revival Style after 1825. Sinnott defines a “Transitional” period from 1700 to 1710, when the square, hipped roof design led to the rectangular, towered one. I have adopted his terminology, but, for my purposes, I will use the term “transitional” to refer to all meetinghouses and churches from 1700 to 1800 that share characteristics derivative of meetinghouse architecture and that anticipate the nineteenth-century shift to the more traditional church architecture.39 Morrison, 433.

25

Fig. 5. Old South Meetinghouse, Boston, Massachusetts, 1730. From Bushman, The Refinement of America, 172.

any other building in Boston, and it was here that meetings protesting the Boston

Massacre and leading to the Boston Tea Party were held.40 Edmund Sinnott argues,

moreover, that the new design was adopted throughout New England because of its

increased size. As populations grew in Massachusetts and Connecticut, so, too, did the

seating capacity of the meetinghouse. The Old South Meetinghouse plan, for example,

called for a rectangle building measuring seventy-two by fifty-four feet. These

measurements increased interior space by seventy percent. The hipped roof feature

became impossible to construct over a rectangular structure, and the central cupola, one

of the meetinghouses distinguishing characteristics, was

replaced with a side tower. The transitional design, then,

could hold a larger congregation at the obvious expense of

a square design as well as a central cupola.41

The Old South, in adopting a rectangular,

transitional plan, did not reject every aspect of

meetinghouse design. The entrance remained initially on

the southern end, not the tower end, and a row of windows

corresponded to each of the two levels. Instead of

featuring a central cupola, the Old South adorned the

western end with a tower topped by a steeple,

spire, and bell. This tower was not flush with

the bulk of the structure but projected from the building (Fig. 5). In effect, the body of

the Old South resembled that of an early meetinghouse: windows and entrances retained 40 Morrison, 433. During the Revolutionary War, General Burgoyne famously ordered the interior ripped out and the shell used as a school for the cavalry. In 1872, this structure was nearly destroyed by fire; a replica of the Old South as it looked before the Revolutionary War was then built on the site.41 Sinnott, 21.

26

Fig. 6. Old South Meetinghouse, Boston, Massachusetts, 1730. From Edsen Breyer’s Postcard Museum, Gallery of Old South Meeting House,http://www.ebpm.com/bost/regpix/glry_bost_oldsou.html

their original positions. The difference between the Old South and an earlier

meetinghouse such as the Old Ship was the added tower and the shift from hipped roof to

two-sided roof design. The transitional structure, then, combined older positioning of

windows and doors with the newer additions and changes of tower and roof.

This melding of the old and new extended into the interior of the transitional

meetinghouse. The seating of the meetinghouse maintained all focus on the pulpit.

Floor-level and gallery pews remained on three sides of the interior, and the elevated

pulpit occupied the fourth wall. The pulpit retained its central significance: the pews

surrounded it and a sounding board hung over it in order to insure that every member

heard the Word of God

proclaimed. Located opposite the

southern entrance, the pulpit was

backed with a clear glass window

that broke the rows of smaller

windows, a crucial characteristic

of the earlier meetinghouses.

Finally, the Old South did not

include an altar, but a removable

communion table (Fig. 6).42 Compared to the Old Ship Meetinghouse, the Old South

differed little in interior design. The Old South had white woodwork and arched

windows, box pews and a two-tiered gallery; however, the placement of the pulpit,

communion table, and benches or pews in Old Ship is repeated in Old South, creating an

atmosphere of an auditorium. The “trinity” of meetinghouse aspects was in Old South,

42 Morrison, 434-435.

27

Figs. 7 & 8. Old North Church, Boston, Massachusetts, 1723. From Edsen Breyer’s Postcard Museum, The Gallery of Old North Church, http://www.ebpm.com/bost/regpix/glry_bost_oldnor.html

Fig. 9. St. James Church, London, England, 1674-1687. From The Great Buildings Collection, http://www.greatbuildings.com/cgibin/gbi.cgi/St_James.html/cid_998640935_StJamesPic_02.gbi

with little modification from the early meetinghouse design other than trim work and

white paint.

All transitional structures followed the basic formula of meetinghouse

arrangement combined with a lengthened body and a towered end. The Old South

Meetinghouse, however, represented a specific type of transitional design: it was an

urban meetinghouse. The Third Church congregation was wealthy compared to

congregations in less densely populated towns and villages. The Old South, as a city

meetinghouse, could afford the opulence of brick and arched windows. Leaving the box

design of the early meetinghouses behind, it competed with a growing Anglican

population by adopting certain architectural features of Anglican churches. Specifically,

the Old South took its inspiration from the Old North Church, an Anglican church in

Boston (Figs 7 & 8).43

Old North, as the first

Georgian church in the colonies,

was the first colonial church to

43 Bushman, 172.

28

imitate the religious architectural style of Sir Christopher Wren, who built and rebuilt

many of London’s churches after the fire of 1666 (Fig. 9).44 The Old North featured two

rows of arched windows, square box pews, and cherubs painted on the ceiling. Old South

did not share the cherubs, but the arched windows and box pews were identical in design.

In addition, the Old North had a longitudinal orientation, with the primary entrance at the

west end and the altar and pulpit at the east. The Old South, however, did not give up the

entrance on the long south side and auditorium seating. The Old North had a type of

nave leading from entrance to altar; the Old South was a typical early transitional

meetinghouse, with entrance and pulpit on the long ends to avoid the appearance of a

nave.45

Both urban Puritan congregations and Anglican parishes had greater immediate

financial resources to build larger meetinghouses or churches. Boston in particular had a

prosperous Anglican population, in part because of the city’s concentration of British

officials. The prosperity of Anglican Boston enabled parishioners to build such religious

structures as Old North. Although not quite the same caliber as Wren’s London

churches, these Anglican churches came from a tradition of ornamentation and trompe

l’oeil on the ceilings. The Old North was obviously a less spectacular church than most

of Wren’s churches; however, the Old North and Wren’s St. James Church in London

shared arched windows and a front entrance tower topped with a steeple. The Anglican

churches in the colonies thus attempted to copy, architecturally, their English

counterparts.

44 Morrison, 82.45 Bushman, 172.

29

Anglican architectural advancements in the colonies ran parallel to conversion

efforts. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts, for example, was established in 1701 to

promote the conversion of the native population as well as the

Puritan settlers. Even in small villages and towns, the SPG

aided in the construction of more than two hundred churches

in the colonies, many times in small towns and villages that

could not have built structures, much less impressive ones,

otherwise. While Anglican churches

throughout the colonies often had the

support of the SPG, and urban Puritan congregations had greater financial resources, the

rural Puritan congregations did not have the same monetary advantages. The members of

Old North and Old South alike built in brick, an expensive material to manufacture and

ship. Puritan congregations in small towns and villages, on the other hand, were obliged

to build with wood, which was more abundant and cheaper. The Farmington

Meetinghouse in Connecticut, built in 1771, was such a structure (Fig. 10).46 Although

constructed in wood, its design resembled that of Old South. In keeping with the

auditorium plan of the meetinghouse, the Farmington structure has its primary entrance

on the long side and the pulpit opposite the primary entrance. The roofline is sharply

two-sided, broken at one end with a tower and steeple.47 The windows, unlike the Old

South, are rectangular—a result of the congregation’s smaller size and less extensive

46 “Farmington Meetinghouse,” The HABS/HAER Image Gallery, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/hhhtml/cthh.html, 19 November 2002. Interestingly, the African captives from the slave ship, Amistad, worshipped at Farmington Meetinghouse for several months in 1841 before returning to Africa.47 Sinnott, 49-50.

30

Fig. 10. Farmington Meetinghouse, Farmington, Connecticut, 1771. From HABS/HAER Image Gallery, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/hhhtml/cthh.html

financial base. Nonetheless, the Farmington Meetinghouse, like its rural and urban

counterparts, demonstrated architectural similarities to colonial Anglican churches.48

Thus, Puritan congregations feared a two-fold threat: urban Anglican

architecture built to reflect monetary success and the extension of conversion efforts

through purposefully remarkable church architecture. Richard Bushman argues that the

beauty of Anglican churches as well as the ceremony of the Anglican liturgy enhanced

their arguments of apostolic and communal authority. He quotes Donald Friar, who

rightly states that Anglicans gave their church steeples the primary function of acting as

“an assertive symbol of the Anglican presence in the community.”49 These colonial

Anglican churches were architectural statements of ecclesiastical and cultural superiority.

In order to counter the attack, Puritan meetinghouses “became self-consciously

beautiful,” adopting Anglican architecture to maintain members and authority within

their communities.50

James Deetz makes the compelling argument that, at the time of the Puritan

transition, the American colonies were re-entering the British cultural orbit. English

tradition, Deetz claims, permeated all aspects of colonial life in English settlements. 51

The Puritans undoubtedly began with English tools and an English architectural outlook:

rejecting European religious architecture, the Puritans substituted it, to some degree, with

English domestic architecture. Deetz also contends that architectural developments grew

increasingly English during the first half of the eighteenth century. The colonies were

48 Sinnott, 43-44. Here Sinnott argues, and I agree, that the similarity between Puritan transitional meetinghouses and Anglican churches was intentional and accomplished in spite of denominational differences.49 Donald Friar, quoted in Bushman 175.50 Bushman, 173.51 James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 175.

31

dependent on English-made goods, and thus, English styles, as part of the imperial

Navigation system.52 Books on architecture began crossing the Atlantic, and these guides

served, not only to decorate the bookshelves of the gentleman architect, but to direct the

emerging occupation of architect in America.53 The eighteenth century thus saw the re-

Anglicization of colonial culture and Puritan architecture because of a new, although one-

way, cultural and architectural exchange over the Atlantic.54

The movement toward Anglican stylings in Puritan architecture was certainly an

expression of increased awareness of a perceived emergent competition along with the

greater availability of uniform architectural guides. Changes within Puritan theology also

developed the transitional architecture. The Great Awakening in particular worked to

transform nascent tendencies toward interdenominational unity into an acceptance of a

wider, more elaborate range of architecture. Unity within Congregationalism55 as well as

between Protestant denominations, a characteristic of the Great Awakening, dated from

the early eighteenth century. In 1708, for example, Connecticut Congregationalists

adopted the Saybrook Platform, calling for a greater ecclesial unity among the scattered

settlements. More affable interdenominational relations were also regular occurrences in

Massachusetts and Connecticut. The first president of Yale, the Reverend Abraham

Pierson, Jr., was a Congregationalist minister who later led a Presbyterian congregation.56

The Great Awakening called these efforts in ecumenism to the forefront. One of the best-

known ministers of the 1730s and 1740s was Anglican: George Whitefield, the great

itinerant, remained an Anglican minister all his life, but also aided in the formation of 52 Leland M. Roth, A Concise History of American Architecture. (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 28.53 See also Chapter 4.54 Deetz, 28.55 The Massachusetts Bay Puritans had absorbed the Plymouth Separatists into their colony by the eighteenth century; the two groups essentially became a united Congregational Church. 56 Sinnot, 18-19. Yale was founded against the increasingly Unitarian tendencies of Harvard.

32

Methodism in England. On the other side of the Atlantic, he helped form a Presbyterian

congregation in Massachusetts.57 On his American tour, Whitefield preached not only in

Anglican churches and town commons but also in the established Old Brick

Meetinghouse of Boston to awaken the sleeping fold.58

Puritan congregations essentially found themselves in new circumstances. In

England, they were “godly communities gathered out of the world”; in America, they

became “established churches responsible for the religious well-being of an entire

society, saints and sinners alike.”59 By the eighteenth century, evangelization among an

increasing population of non-Congregational denominations, such as Anglicanism, was

the next step in building the “City.” The Saybrook Platform encouraged unity within

Congregationalism; the Great Awakening honed efforts beyond the Puritan fold.

Changing situations, in other words, called for new measures: ecumenism could be a tool

for evangelization and conversion within as well as beyond the Puritan tradition.60 This

was realized architecturally in the adoption of Anglican—or rather, traditional—forms of

expressing religiosity.

The Puritans, moreover, did not abandon their faith for membership, but they did

compromise certain components of their preferred architectural expressions either to

compete with or to reach a spirit of unity with other denominations. These architectural

compromises were, perhaps, more than later Puritans’ rejection of early Puritans’

asceticism. The earliest Puritan settlers tacitly acknowledged that prayer and worship

57 Sinnott, 41-42.58 Ahlstrom, 284. Whitefield commented, “I am verily persuaded, the Generality of Preachers talk of an unknown, unfelt Christ. And the Reason why Congregations have been so dead, is because dead Men preach to them.”59 Mark A. Peterson, “The Plymouth Church and the Evolution of Puritan Religious Culture,” The New England Quarterly 66 (December 1993), 592.60 Peterson, 592.

33

made particular places sacred: Mather had his “closet,” for example. This intensified

during the Great Awakening. Jonathan Edwards, the Congregational minister, often

wrote about a clearing in the woods that became his place for prayer.61 He had a

geographical point of communication with God, and it was sacred. Although Edwards

had a penchant for preaching outside—and went outside for prayer—he demonstrated the

same outlook as Mather: some places are simply more sacred than others. Edwards was

unconventional, but the theology was the same. God is everywhere and always, but

certain places and certain times are sanctified.

The early Puritans apparently rejected the ideology of sanctity of place. Their

theology held that no place was sacred, and the church as a particularly holy place was a

possible denial that God was anywhere else. Whether or not the Puritans were justified in

this view, they did not practice it. As I have shown, from the outset of Puritan

architectural development in America, the Puritans built meetinghouses in rejection of

“theatrical gaudiness”: the plainness of the first meetinghouses attests to the lack of

ornamentation. Yet this meetinghouse—specifically, the centralized pulpit—was their

meeting place with God. Just as a study or a tree was the personal place for prayer of

Mather and Edwards, the meetinghouse was an axis mundi for the entire community.

During the Great Awakening, Edwards and others began preaching to congregations

outside of any man-made confines. This heightened the awareness that God was

everywhere, including the natural world. But the point of communion between God and

man was the point from which His Word was spoken, and this was still, generally, the

pulpit. The Puritans of the eighteenth century, then, were not compromising religious

belief. They were responding to increases in population within and without the faith, to

61 Walsh, 89.

34

the availability of architectural texts, and to a perceived Anglican threat. They were also

spurred to ecumenical gestures through the Great Awakening and an increased awareness

that God was everywhere—in nature and maybe, even, in the architectural detail of a

meetinghouse.

Chapter 4

The Congregational Church

The Puritan meetinghouse at the end of the eighteenth century was undoubtedly

different from the meetinghouse of 1700 or of 1630. The primary emphasis, however,

did not change. In Chapter Three, I proposed that the Puritans maintained a central

pulpit, although the structure surrounding that pivotal area changed. In spite of the

increased attention to detail, the Puritans did not engage in a complete, unthinking

acceptance of “theatrical gaudiness.” Rather, the transitional state indicated a heightened

awareness of symbolism and the importance of the pulpit. While very few

Congregationalists articulated this awareness about the transitional meetinghouse

structure, many began expressing their ideas about the new church design after 1800.

Each claimed that decorative detail was not an indication of worldliness but proper

35

ornamentation for the house of God. Perhaps these later Puritans did not reject the call to

build a “City upon a Hill,” but retained the spirit of reformation by reforming their own

architecture.

By 1800, the Puritan religion had changed, and would continue to change, in

architecture and in doctrine. Committees and councils appeared to deal specifically with

an architectural response to the difficult issue of Unitarianism and the formation of the

new nation. During this time of questions and tension, the descendants of the Puritans

responded architecturally with the church. The incipient symbolism of the meetinghouse,

early and transitional, would come to the forefront of nineteenth-century architectural

expression. Indeed, after 1800, the meetinghouse truly became a church, acknowledged

as such in word and in architectural deed.

In the early 18th century, builders across the colonies looked to England for

inspiration and imitation. The Navigation Acts limited the colonists to mostly English

goods, including English architectural plans in the newly published books of the time.

James Gibbs’s Book of Architecture, popular in England and the colonies, elucidated the

designs of Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren. Indeed, Gibbs’s book was published

two years before the completion of Old South Meetinghouse, reinforcing the dominance

of Anglican architecture in New England. These books were aimed generally at the

gentleman scholar, being “large in format, expensive, and largely theoretical.”62 Before

1800, meetinghouse committees and building teams composed of the male members of

congregations built along simple architectural guidelines: each structure was square, two-

storied, and had three entrances. By 1720, congregations began adopting the transitional

design, and architects—trained and untrained—deciphered Gibbs’s entries in order to

62 Roth, 29.

36

transform their meetinghouses. The builder of Farmington Meetinghouse, for example,

was Captain Judah Woodruff, a member of the congregation in Farmington. Captain

Woodruff had no formal architectural training, but his design for Farmington was, and is,

considered one of the best examples of the spired transitional type. Indeed, a later

architect, Asher Benjamin, included the Farmington Meetinghouse in his comprehensive

church style guides.63

While the first half of the eighteenth century saw an increase in gentleman

builders, the second half saw a rise of formally trained architects. Benjamin was the most

prominent and prolific of these first architects in the design of early Congregational

churches. Instead of relying on the English architectural guides, Benjamin compiled the

first American pattern books, The Country Builder’s Assistant, in 1797, and The

American Builder’s Companion, in 1806. Benjamin’s guides essentially offered new

architects variations on a theme new to Congregationalists: the church.64 Benjamin began

his career as a country carpenter, and he soon realized the potential usefulness of a

comprehensive and comprehensible design aid. Taking inspiration from church designs,

especially those of Charles Bulfinch, Benjamin essentially created the new church plan

that would spread across New England and take root in Massachusetts in particular.

63 Morrison, 460-461.64 Roth, 64-65.

37

His “Design for a Church”

showed marked similarities to two

of Bulfinch’s churches: those of

the Pittsfield and Taunton, both Massachusetts congregations (Figs. 11 & 12). Unlike the

transitional structure, an entrance bay sat at the tower end of the church, with the tower

straddling the body of the structure and the porch itself. This entranceway did not extend

across the front of the façade: it allowed room on either side for a column of windows on

the main structure of the church. The bay usually had three doors at the front, like the

Taunton Church, and sometimes two others on the sides of the bay, like the Pittsfield

Church. The Bulfinch churches also featured Palladian windows on the bay and on the

tower, as well as a cornice at the top of the bay, significant deviations from the square or

slightly arched windows of the transitional meetinghouses. The tower was topped by an

38

Fig. 11. Pittsfield Congregational Church, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 1789. From Sinnott, Meetinghouse and Church Architecture in Early New England, 76.

Fig. 12. Taunton Congregational Church, Taunton, Massachusetts, 1830. From Sinnott, Meetinghouse and Church Architecture in Early New England, 79.

open copula or belfry design. The Benjamin “Design for a Church” expounded upon

Bulfinch’s design, especially the entrance bay feature (Fig. 14). Benjamin’s design

included a shallow bay with three windows; three doors ran across the entrance bay; and

the belfry had an octagonal stage above, making it more elaborate than Bulfinch’s steeple

design. Benjamin planned most of his wooden churches for country congregations;

Bulfinch, however, designed mostly brick churches for wealthier urban congregations.65

The interior of the church design reflected the exterior, particularly in the move

toward a tower entrance. In effect, Bulfinch and Benjamin created a nave by moving the

entrance to one of the shorter ends. The earliest meetinghouses were almost square, and

the distance from the northern, pulpit side, to the main entrance on the southern wall, was

approximately the same measurement as the distance from the eastern side to the western

side. The transitional meetinghouses lengthened the structure, but the expansion

occurred from east to west. The entrance remained on the southern side, except this side

was one of the long sides. The new church design reversed the extension: instead of a

southern entrance, the entrance was now generally located on the western end, through

the tower. The pulpit moved to the eastern wall, opposite the primary doorway, and an

aisle to the pulpit from the door accentuated the long lines of the interior. Although the

dimensions and orientation of the churches were strikingly different from the first

meetinghouses, churches inspired by Bulfinch and Benjamin retained both stories, the

rows of windows, the pulpit window, and the place of the pulpit as the architectural focal

point (Fig. 13).

65 Sinnott, 76, 80-82.

39

Figs. 13 & 14. “Design for a Church,” from The Country Builder’s Assistant, 1797. From Sinnott, Meetinghouse and Church Architecture in Early New England, 81.

Figs. 15 & 16. At left: Lee Congregational Church, Lee, Massachusetts, 1793. At right: Center Congregational Church, New Haven, Connecticut, 1814. From Sinnott, Meetinghouse and Church Architecture in Early New England, 82 & 130.

The first church most likely built on Benjamin’s plan was the Congregational

Church in Lee, Massachusetts (Fig. 15).

It is no longer standing, but drawings

remain that demonstrate the

exemplification of Benjamin’s design.

Built in 1800, the Lee Congregational

Church featured a frontal tower not quite

flush with the front of the structure but

based in an entrance bay. Three

doors led to the interior of the

church; the middle door was the

most prominent, as it was topped with a small cornice. The Lee Church also had two

Palladian windows: one immediately above the primary door and one on the tower. The

tower had an octagonal stage and belfry. Benjamin’s design extended to a much lesser

degree to Connecticut. The First Congregational Church in North Woodbury, built in

1816, was the only Benjamin-designed church in the state. Details and adjustments based

on Benjamin’s design, however, found their way across New England. The Center

Congregational Church in New Haven, built with Ithiel Town, another prominent New

England architect, reflected a distant architectural kinship to Benjamin’s “Design” (Fig.

16). The entrance, for example, was one prominent doorway flanked by two others, and

the tower spanned the body and entrance. Several differences marked the 1814 New

Haven church, including the ornamentation on the cornice, the return to arched windows,

40

the enclosed belfry, and—most importantly—the columned portico instead of an entrance

bay.66

Indeed, the Center Church revealed an emergent trend in all American

architecture after the turn of the nineteenth century: Greek Revival design. The style had

specific implications for Congregational churches. Whereas previous churches treated

the entrance almost as an enlarged extension of the tower, the Center Church created a

separate and more imposing portico. The columns made the church seem tall and

prominent, emphasizing the upward lift of the tower. Pilasters extended the vertical line

on the tower, and heavy dentures decorated the cornices. Edmund Sinnott states that the

result of the Greek Revival influence in New England caused many churches to resemble

“temples with steeples”—ironic considering the early Puritans’ refusal of any architecture

suggesting religious tradition.67 These new churches ironically combined the look of a

Greek temple with the orientation of a church in the Catholic tradition.

Once Benjamin’s plan and Bulfinch’s influence spread throughout Massachusetts

and Connecticut, a surprising diversity claimed cityscape and countryside alike. In the

years after 1830, no particular style or design dominated the architecture of the

Congregational Church. In 1852, New England congregations sent delegates to Albany

in order to determine guidelines for sending building aid to congregations. In deciding

upon this particular policy, the General Congregational Convention agreed that only two

concepts should unite Congregational architecture everywhere: good taste and a central

pulpit. A Book of Plans for Churches and Parsonages, which resulted from the

convention, aimed at perpetuating appropriate religious expressions in architecture. The

66 Sinnott, 88-89.67 Sinnott, 26.

41

Book of Plans recommended the use of an architect for every new church building and

suggested simply that church architecture “should be satisfactory to good taste.”68 The

particular style of the church, moreover, was not as important as the emphasis on

symbolism and interior arrangement of the church. Whereas early Puritans denied any

symbolism, and eighteenth-century Congregationalists found refuge in a blend of

meetinghouse and traditional church architecture, the Convention agreed that, as long as

the Word of God remained central, any tasteful architectural enhancement was proper.

The Convention wrote:

In all the churches which Christianity, as reformed and brought back to its spiritual simplicity, has constructed for its own use, so working out a natural manifestation of its own ideas, the most conspicuous thing in the temple, the central point of attention for the assembly, is the pulpit for the living ministry of the living word, and before it, as convenience dictates, the table for the commemorative bread and wine.69

Retaining “spiritual simplicity,” they agreed, could be less obvious than hard benches and

white walls. Ornamentation and decoration did no harm if the central point remained the

pulpit and the Word spoken from it.

The Convention became the full expression of the tension in Congregational

architecture created, in part, by the Great Awakening. The Congregationalists of the mid-

eighteenth century felt, on one hand, pressure from the Anglican architectural presence,

and, on the other hand, a spirit of ecumenism toward all Protestant denominations. In

part, the solution to this tension was to perpetuate an architectural compromise between

meetinghouse and church. But how far should this compromise be taken? What should

be maintained of the meetinghouse tradition, and what should be adopted from the

traditional architecture of the church? The answer, wrote the Convention, was to

68 A Book of Plans for Churches and Parsonages, quoted in Bushman, 339.69 A Book of Plans for Churches and Parsonages, quoted in Bushman, 343.

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maintain allegiance to the primary focus of the Puritan meetinghouse: the pulpit.

Additional symbols were not forbidden, and Congregationalists should not be forbidden

from using them if they represented fundamental Christian truths. The Convention

decided that the cross, for example, was a perfectly acceptable architectural statement of

faith:

The cross, in which the first apostle gloried and which is endeared to all Christians as the symbol of the atonement, it would seem, might safely crown our Christian temples, holding its place undisturbed and without giving offence, wherever the Savior is honored or his truth believed. There is no reason why…we be forbidden the manifest advantage which its use would often give us; or why, in this respect, we should suffer in comparison with other Christian denominations.70

The cross was not “theatrical gaudiness.” Indeed, stained glass, Gothic steeples, padded

box pews, and painted white exteriors were not abhorrent to the Congregational faith

after 1800. If the center of the service and the architecture remained the pulpit, and all

could hear the Word spoken from it, then the church was proper for preaching. It was

“tasteful.”

The churches of this last phase reflect the continuing focus on the pulpit and the

freedom to decorate and ornament the structure itself. The Greek Revival style

encouraged the use of columns, pilasters, and cornices on the exterior as well as the

interior of the church. The First Congregational Church in Litchfield, Connecticut,

reflected this particular trend: in 1828, the original meetinghouse was

razed for a larger white structure with a columned portico and tower

entrance (Fig. 17). In 1873, however, the congregation voted to move

services to a Victorian Gothic structure, complete with stained glass

windows and dark wooden furniture, while lending the older structure

70 A Book of Plans for Churches and Parsonages, quoted in Bushman, 345.

43

to the town for uses as an armory, a dance hall, and even a movie theater at one time. A

preservation movement in 1929 reestablished the 1829 structure as the church of choice

for the Litchfield Congregation.71 The Litchfield churches demonstrated the dramatic

shifts in architecture during the nineteenth century; moreover, they were typical of the

Congregationalist response to church design. According to the Convention, a church was

suitable for the congregation of people in the name of God if His Word was spoken there.

Columns and stained glass did not detract from this primary purpose, and neither did

columns and porticos.

The Congregationalists of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth

century, as during the Great Awakening, adopted church design in part due to

denominational and even political stimulations. Unitarianism indirectly encouraged

Congregationalist articulation about

appropriate types of church architecture.

Throughout the eighteenth century,

Congregationalist theologians debated the nature and existence of the Trinity. While

those based at Harvard decided that the Trinity did not exist—that is, God is One Person

—theologians centered at Yale maintained the threefold nature of God.72 Just as Harvard

and Yale split over this and several other doctrinal issues, so congregations across New

England separated and formed Unitarian and Congregationalist congregations and

churches. Church structures thus multiplied at a rapid rate across New England.

This new situation demanded that the remaining Congregationalists define their

doctrine and their architecture to a greater degree. The best evidence of this was the

71 “The History of Our Church,” The First Congregational Church of Litchfield, http://www.fcclitchfield.org/fcchistory.html, 14 November 2002.72 Ahlstrom, 401.

44

Fig. 17. First Congregational Church of Litchfield, Connecticut, 1829, 1929. From The First Congregational Church of Litchfield, http://www.fcclitchfield.org/fcchistory.html.

Convention of 1852, which resulted in an exhaustive consideration of Congregationalist

church architecture and symbolism. Their result was the same as the early Puritan

response: the pulpit must remain central. Indeed, while the Book of Plans suggested the

use of ornamentation and symbols, they never recognized architecture in bad taste;

simply put, the later Congregationalists, like Cotton Mather, denied “theatrical

gaudiness.” Mather defined gaudy ornamentation as anything that would detract from the

spoken Word of God, and so, too, did the Convention of 1852. Of course, Cotton Mather

considered all ornamentation anathema, and later Congregationalists conceded that

common symbols of faith and tasteful architectural design did not detract from the

spoken Word of God. A continuum between the first Puritans and later

Congregationalists nonetheless existed: barring the disparity concerning the

appropriateness of ornamentation, both agreed that the pulpit was central to the meeting

or the service. The first meetinghouses undeniably appeared plainer, simpler, and starker

than the Litchfield Church of 1829; however, all aisles led to the pulpit. The

congregation still came to hear the Word of God.

The political situation of the United States also played a role in Congregationalist

adoption of churches. The first meetinghouses were used for all meetings, including

political ones. The Old South Meetinghouse in Boston, for example, was the site of

gatherings before the Boston Tea Party as well as after the Boston Massacre. Although

the Congregational Church was the official church of most of New England into the early

years of the nineteenth century, religious toleration became the accepted political mode.

The church retained its role as the center of New England town life—secular and

religious—for some time, and it was still tax-supported. However, Episcopalians as well

45

as Baptists and Unitarians began building more and more of their own places of worship,

diminishing the importance of the Congregational church as the only place to meet. The

churches outside Congregationalism possessed no secular obligations and, emphasized by

the interpretation that church and state should be—and were—separate, they affirmed the

Congregationalist move toward the church.73 While some Congregational churches were

built before 1800, no meetinghouses were built after 1800. The house for meeting had

become the house of God.

The Congregationalists of the nineteenth century witnessed a phenomenon

unthinkable to the early Puritans. Mather wrote against even using the word “church” to

describe a place of gathering, and secular meetings were held within the walls of the

meetinghouse. Just as one space was not holier than another, all times were equally holy:

Christmas was “Fool’s Tide,” and a weekly Sabbath was a debatable doctrine for many

early Puritans. In doctrine, the Puritans held that no time or place could be characterized

as specifically God’s time or God’s place. Everywhere and all time fit this description.

This idea, however, was limited to the realm of ideology; in Puritans’ practice, one place

was, in fact, holier than another. On Sunday and Thursday, all would gather inside the

walls of a meetinghouse. With few exceptions, the meetinghouse was the site for weekly

meetings with God through his Word.

The Puritans revealed a more complicated moral universe than one so easily

characterized as negative or ascetic. The meetinghouse fulfilled the human need for a

connective point between God and man. Centered on the pulpit, the meetinghouse was a

communal axis mundi. While rejecting the focus on an altar, the Puritans nonetheless

created their own architecture not completely unlike the traditional church design. The

73 Sinnott, 23.

46

congregation came to hear the Word of God and worship in his name. As long as the

pulpit was central, the façade could accept ornamentation and symbolic decoration. The

purpose, then, of the meetinghouse and the church was the same. Exteriors changed, but

function remained. In this, the early Puritans had much in common with the nineteenth-

century Congregationalists.

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Chapter 5

The Meetinghouse and the Church in Logical Continuum

John Winthrop wrote about a “City upon a Hill.” The “City” was Boston as well

as Hingham, Litchfield as well as New Haven: each was a beacon that shined from the

New World to light the way for all. The meetinghouses of the City functioned as plain,

multipurpose, unsanctified places of gathering. These meetinghouses were no more and

no less holy than anywhere else. To indicate that Puritan places of gathering were

particularly holy would be, for the Puritans, the act of assuming the possibility that God

created some places less holy than others. All of God’s creation was holy, and no place

was sacred. The meetinghouse was, moreover, simply a gathering place. The lack of

icons suggested that praise of God occurred in written and spoken word, not in the

creation of art or architecture. Listening to Scripture and sermon, praying together and

alone, the Puritans rejected any apparent expression of faith in the architecture of the

meetinghouse. It was a space with function and without symbolism.

This cursory glance at the history of the architecture of the City seems to contain

contradictions. The first places of gathering were plain and square. Two-storied in order

to seat all members, the pulpit was the central focus of the space. No tower, no steeple,

no ornamentation: these places were functional rather than obviously symbolic. Yet even

these early meetinghouses represented the religious aspirations of the settlers. While

Puritan ideology expressed a faith built upon the Word, not plastic symbols, their reality

reflected a more complicated, more positive theology. The Puritans certainly rejected

aspects of Anglicanism that they saw as tainted. They wished to build a City in the name

of God, purified of the imperfections gathered over time by human action and tradition.

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However, Puritans also expressed a positive faith reflected in the architecture of the

meetinghouse. The very “plainness” of the meetinghouse demonstrated the simplicity

that they strived to obtain in their faith. They purified church architecture, and in that

respect, expressed the hopefulness of their ideology: although sinners, they could reform

the church and its architecture.

While the adoption of a focal pulpit was not exclusive to the Puritans as a

Reformed religion, it characterized their places of gathering and became essential to their

places of worship. In reforming the architecture of Christian tradition, the Puritans

placed the pulpit at the forefront of the meetinghouse. The connection between God and

man was through the Word of God, and the pulpit was necessarily in view and in hearing

range of every member. Benches and pews were arranged around the pulpit, and light

filtered through the windows to illuminate the Word of God. The doorway was directly

across from the pulpit, connecting the outward façade of the meetinghouse with the

interior. Everything within and without the meetinghouse thus indicated the significance

of the function of the pulpit. The centrality of the pulpit and the Word never changed.

Even the shift to the Congregational church revealed the continued importance of the

pulpit’s position in the interior architecture of the space. Indeed, as long as the pulpit

remained central, the church could feature any style of ornamentation and design.

The shift from meetinghouse to church was not part of a linear progression. It

was not inevitable or foreseeable from the perspective of the first Massachusetts Bay

Puritans. In addition, the continued existence of many types of meetinghouses and

churches throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut undercuts the theory that all Puritans

everywhere changed the architecture of their places of gathering with every new shift.

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While the Old Ship Meetinghouse adopted certain aspects of the transitional

meetinghouse then the church, the congregation never razed the meetinghouse or changed

the structure completely. Old Ship maintained some aspects of the first structure, such as

the hipped roofline. The Farmington Meetinghouse, a transitional style structure,

retained its orientation and attached tower. It never adopted the architectural features of

the Congregational church. Finally, although many congregations hired architects to

build churches based on Benjamin’s design after 1800, not every church followed his

exact plan. Many, especially in Connecticut, utilized the entrance bay and dispensed with

his steeple or adopted an octagonal stage and opted for a columned portico. After 1830,

the ecclesial architecture of Congregationalism depended even less on a particular design

or architect, and by 1852, no Congregational design existed. Taste and a central pulpit

were the only two criteria.

The Puritans and their descendants had architectural choices. The first settlers of

the Massachusetts Bay Colony chose to build their meetinghouses in rejection of a tainted

tradition and in the hope of beginning a new one. Every aspect of the façade suggested

that, while not a church, the meetinghouse was an important structure. Its sheer size,

number of windows, and central cupola all indicated that this place was central to the

town or village. With the emergence of the transitional style, the side tower increasingly

marked the meetinghouse as a place of gathering. Its associations with traditional church

architecture, moreover, designated that the transitional meetinghouse was, in some sense,

part of this tradition. In other words, the transitional meetinghouse was more obviously a

place of worship. Finally, the Congregational church accepted all types of architecture.

Writing on the meaning of the cross, the Convention of 1852 stated that taste was the

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design criterion. In addition, symbols such as the cross were acceptable in all churches

that professed the Word of God. In this new articulation of the meaning of church

architecture, Congregationalists thus connected their purpose, to centralize the Word of

God, with traditional symbolism. They linked the symbol of the pulpit with a traditional

symbol of Christ.

The earliest Puritans rejected obvious symbols, but they did not reject the idea of

symbolism. The meetinghouse was the location of the communal axis mundi, the pulpit.

The Puritans themselves represented a return to the Word, unfettered by ceremony. This

is the true meaning of the Puritan denial of “theatrical gaudiness.” It was not to reject

symbolism, but to create their own tradition of architectural representations of faith. And

this is exactly what the Puritans and Congregationalists did: instead of using traditional

symbols of Christianity, the Puritans developed the architectural symbol of the pulpit, and

the Congregationalists perpetuated the architecture of the meetinghouse even while

adopting the façade and orientation of the church. A fundamental break did not occur

between the architecture of the seventeenth century and the architecture of the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries. The focus of the architecture remained the same.

I have used the phrase “religious architecture” with extreme trepidation simply

because the expression is such a loaded one. Ideologically, the first meetinghouses were

not religious. The Puritans used the meetinghouse for court sessions and town meetings

as well as the site of weekly, and often daily, meetings in the name of God. I have

attempted to prove, however, that the meetinghouse was a religious place in practice. It

was sacred as the communal axis mundi. The Reverend Laurinda Bilyeu Hotchkiss

writes about Puritan religious architecture:

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Symbols are powerful. At some points in human history, groups have tried to leave symbols behind. The Puritans eliminated all iconography from their stark meetinghouses, determined to reach God only through their hearts and minds. But symbolism crept back in.74

Revered Hotchkiss is correct in saying that the Puritans eliminated icons from their

meetinghouses. However, symbolism was there in the very starkness of the

meetinghouses. An architectural representation of faith existed in the space.

In a certain respect, then, the Puritans did not simply eliminate all symbolism.

They replaced old symbols with new ones: their emphasis on the Word of God became

their symbol of faith. As Puritanism grew into Congregationalism, and

Congregationalists accepted the symbolism of the cross, the pulpit retained its centrality.

Amidst declension in membership, efforts at evangelism and ecumenism, and apparent

architectural competition, the descendants of the Puritans maintained the architecture of

the pulpit. The meetinghouse and the church, in spite of their obvious differences, are

part of a logical continuum. Certain sacrifices were made in architecture and in doctrine,

sacrifices that placed Puritan ideology closer to the realm of Congregational practice. In

no way does this suggest that the Puritans were completely and utterly incorrect in their

attempts to create an architecture of faith. Indeed, I would like to posit that the Puritans

succeeded. While some aspects of their ideology failed to converge with their reality,

perhaps the later Congregationalists realized that convergence in their churches. The

Congregational church was an architectural compromise to a certain degree, but the

church maintained the essence of the architectural design created by the earliest Puritans.

74 Reverend Laurinda Bilyeu Hotchkiss, “Symbolism II: When What You See Means Something Else,” The First Parish Church in Milton, http://users.rcn.com/fpmilton/Sermons/2001/20011021-SymbolismII.htm, 24 November 2002.

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The architecture of every faith requires serious observation and consideration.

The Puritans ordered their ideology and reality in a specific way, and their architecture

reflected the apparent contradiction and the deeper, ultimate resolution of theological

tension. Puritan meetinghouse and church architecture was truly religious, with its own

symbolism. Even when finally condoning the symbol of the cross, Congregationalists

still placed that symbolism within the context of their own faith. I have attempted a brief

look at the generation of Puritan religious architecture from meetinghouse to church,

keeping this in mind. I have discovered that Puritan theology created particular symbols,

although not typical ones, and eventually adopted symbols of a common Christian

tradition. Ultimately, the architecture of the meetinghouse and the church needs careful

interpretation, like all religious symbols. Sometimes, in reflecting upon the points of

divergence in symbolism and theology, we can find unexpected continuity.

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Selected Bibliography

I. Primary Sources and Websites

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“Farmington Meetinghouse.” The HABS/HAER Image Gallery, Library of

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2002.

“First Congregational Church of Litchfield.” The First Congregational Church

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November 2002.

Hotchkiss, Reverend Laurinda Bilyeu. “Symbolism II: When What You See Means

Something Else.” The First Parish Church in Milton Official Website.

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Howe, Jeffery. A Digital Archive of American Architecture.

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Mather, Cotton. Selections from Cotton Mather. Ed. Murdock, Kenneth Ballard.

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“Old North Church.” Edsen Breyer’s Postcard Museum, The Gallery of

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Sinnott, Edmund W. Meeting House and Church Architecture in Early New

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57