The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 5, May, 1884Various
History
The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 5, May, 1884
Various
Massachusetts -- Periodicals; New England -- Periodicals
The "common" building was used for religious and other meetings until
the meeting-house with its platform on top for cannon, on Burial Hill,
was built in 1622. "Boston seems to have had no special building for
public worship until, during the year 1632, was erected the small
thatched-roof, one-story building which stood on State Street, where
Brazer's building now stands."[A] This was in the second year, the
settlement having been made in the autumn of 1630. In Charlestown, "The
Great House," the first building erected that could be called a house,
was first used as the official residence of the governor, and the
sessions of the Court of Assistants appear to have been held in it until
the removal to Boston, but when the church was formed, in 1632, it was
used for a meeting-house.
[Footnote A: Memorial History of Boston, vol. i, p. 119.]
Dorchester had the first meeting-house in the Bay, built in 1631, the
next year after settlement, and by the famous order passed "mooneday
eighth of October, 1633," it appears that it was the regular
meeting-place of the inhabitants of the plantation for general purposes.
The Lynn church was formed in 1632, and the meeting-house appears to
have been built soon after, and was used for town meetings till 1806. It
was the same in towns of later settlement. In Brunswick, Maine, which
became a township in 1717, the first public building was the
meeting-house, and this also was the town-house for almost one hundred
years. Belfast, Maine, incorporated in 1773, held its first two town
meetings in a private house, afterwards, for eighteen years, "at the
Common on the South end of No. 26" (house lot),[A] whether under cover
or in open air is not known, after that, in the meeting-house generally,
till the town hall was built. In Harpswell, Maine, the old
meeting-house, like that described, when abandoned as a house of
worship, was sold to the town for one hundred dollars and is still in
use as a town-house.
[Footnote A: Williamson's History of Belfast.]
The town-house, therefore, though it cannot strictly be said to have
been coëval with the town, was essentially so, the meeting-house being
generally the first public building, and used equally for town meetings
and public worship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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