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.

How early, then, was the town? When the settlement at Plymouth took
place, in one sense a town existed at once. It was a collection of
families living in neighborhood and united by the bonds of mutual
obligation common in similar English communities. But it was a town as
yet only in that sense. In fact, it was a state. The words of the
compact signed on board the Mayflower were, in part: "We, whose names
are underwritten ... do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the
presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves
together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and
preservation, ... and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame