The Architecture of Colonial AmericaEberlein, Harold Donaldson
History
The Architecture of Colonial America
Eberlein, Harold Donaldson
Architecture -- United States; Architecture, Colonial
In many places, particularly in the Middle and Southern Colonies, the
churches were regarded as the most dignified places of sepulture for
persons of consequence, and their gravestones, with the armorial
bearings and inscriptions almost effaced by the treading feet of
generations of worshippers, are to be seen in the aisles and chancel
pavements. The chancel was esteemed the most honourable place of burial
and as an instance of this may be mentioned the grave of General Forbes,
the hero of Fort Duquesne, in the chancel of Christ Church,
Philadelphia. John Penn, one of the Proprietaries, is buried at the
foot of the chancel steps. It is interesting in this connexion to note,
by way of exception, that Judge Moore of Moore Hall, the stout old
Pennsylvania Loyalist, and the person of greatest consequence in the
parish of St. David, Radnor, directed that he and his wife, the Lady
Williamina Wemyss, should be buried at the threshold of the church.
Emblazoned hatchments were frequently used at the time of funerals and
some of them are still preserved in our old churches. As in England,
during much of the eighteenth century, it was the fashion in the
Colonies to bury persons of note at night by the light of torches.
In not a few of the early churches there was an utter lack of uniformity
in the style of the seats or pews employed and permission was often
granted to influential persons to buy space within the churches and
erect pews of their own, suited to their personal fancy. The space not
occupied by these privately owned pews was sometimes filled with movable
benches, stools, or chairs, and it was not an unusual thing for the
humbler members of the congregation to bring their seats with them and
put them wherever they could find room. We find ample evidence of this
condition of things in places as widely apart as the simple country
parish of St. David’s, Radnor, in the Welsh Barony, and King’s Chapel
in Boston. In early days the members of St. David’s congregation fetched
thither nondescript seats as they listed and it was not until well into
the eighteenth century that rough benches were furnished and “rented for
the support of the Church.” Not till the middle of the eighteenth
century do the parish records show the existence of pews and the custom
seems to have then prevailed of “selling a piece of ground within the
Church on which the purchaser had the privilege of building such a pew
as he desired.” With this system, or rather lack of system, in seating,
it appears that squabbles occasionally arose as we may judge from the
following minute in the old register:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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