Antiques.

Every Town ought to have a Minister[.] New York has first a Chaplain belonging to the Fort of the Church of England; Secondly, a Dutch Calvinist, thirdly a French Calvinist, fourthly a Dutch Lutheran--Here bee not many of the Church of England; few Roman Catholics; abundance of Quakers preachers ... Women especially; Singing Quakers, Ranting Quakers; Sabbatarians; Antisabbatarians; Some Anabaptists[;] some Independents; some Jews; in short[,] of all sorts of opinions there are some, and the most part [are] of none at all.

Governor Thomas Dongan, "Report to the Committee of Trade on the province of New York," February 22, 1687

Between 1687 and the Revolution, religion in America became fay move varied than even Governor Dongan, himself a Catholic, might have imagined. In those years new church buildings and newly organized congregations outpaced the colonies' population growth. The result was a religious pluralism far more extensive than any found in Europe. As Hector Saint John de Crevecoeur wrote in Letters from an American Farmer in the 1780s, in America "all sects are mixed, as well as all nations."

Larger urban churches emulated British styles most closely, sometimes following English design books such as James Gibbs's Book of Architecture of 1728. Congregational meetinghouses reflected Old World elements but with New World details imposed by the craftsmen who built them. New England Congregationalists often painted their meetinghouses vibrant colors rather than the ubiquitous white used in the nineteenth century. In 1762, for example, in Pomfret, Connecticut, it was decreed that "The new meeting-house should be colored on the outside of an orange color--the doors and bottom boards of a chocolate color--the windows, jets [projections], corner boards and weather boards, colored white."

The meetinghouse contributed a new aesthetic to colonial New England to complement the rise of the artisan in secular ...