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The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 5, May, 1884 by Various
page 39 of 128 (30%)
THE NEW ENGLAND TOWN-HOUSE.

By J.B. SEWALL.


A Recollection of my boyhood is a large unpainted barnlike building
standing at a point where three roads met at about the centre of the
town. When all the inhabitants of the town were of one faith
religiously, or at least the minority were not strong enough to divide
from the majority, and one meeting-house served the purposes of all,
this was the meeting-house. To this, the double line of windows all
round, broken by the long round-topped window midway on the back side,
and the two-storied vestibule on the front, and, more than all, the old
pulpit still remaining within, with the sounding-board suspended above
it, bore witness. Here assembled every spring, at the March meeting, the
voters of the town, to elect their selectmen and other town officers for
the ensuing year, to vote what moneys should be raised for the repair of
roads, bridges, maintaining the poor, etc., and take any other action
their well-being as a community demanded; in the autumn, to cast their
votes for state representative, national representative, governor of the
State, or President of the United States, one or all together, as the
case might be.

Many such town-houses, probably, are standing to-day in the New England
States,--I know there are such in Maine,--and they are existing
witnesses to what was generally the fact: towns, at the first, when
young and small, built the meeting-house for two purposes; first, for
use as a house of worship; second, for town meetings; and when in
process of time a new church or churches were built for the better
accommodation of the people, or because different denominations had come
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