Chaste and pure: Maine's eighteenth-century meetinghouses.

Maine's remote position in the far Northeast--where the sun first shines on the continental United States--has made its residents resistant to change and aware of their state's individuality, especially when it comes to a love of its history and appreciation for preservation. Perhaps that is why Maine still has five Protestant meetinghouses that date from the era of the American Revolution. However, while architectural historians have praised isolated examples of surviving meetinghouses elsewhere in New England, scholarship has rarely focused on these amazing survivals, which are, in addition, clustered so closely together that they can be visited in half a day. (1) Located in Harpswell, Bristol, Harrington, Waldoboro, and Alna, they are all on the National Register of Historic Places, and all but the one in Harrington are documented in the Historic American Building Survey (HABS). (2) In this article, we shall examine and relate them to Maine's religious development at the close of the eighteenth century. In their purity of line they bespeak the chaste beliefs of Maine's population at that time.

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Portuguese and French fishermen had been harvesting the sea off the coast of Maine for some time before the first permanent settlement was attempted in 1607, at the tip of a peninsula where the Androscoggin and Kennebec Rivers form Merrymeeting Bay and flow into the Atlantic Ocean. (3) With the relative peace that began after the last of the French and Indian Wars in the mid-eighteenth century, towns began to flourish along the Kennebec and on the numerous close-by peninsulas. By 1760--just before the five surviving meetinghouses were erected--the growth in population had led to the creation of Lincoln County, which encompassed all the lands east of the Kennebec--the region where four of the meetinghouses still stand.

The early meetinghouses of the Puritan settlers evolved locally. The available building materials, harsh climate, and geographic isolation all contributed to the development of an architectural style that is unique to New England, rather than being linked to European antecedents. Unlike old-world Catholic and Lutheran churches, where the focus was on the rituals at the altar at the end of a long nave, the role of the minister in delivering the word of God and the communal nature of the service were most important in New England Protestant services. Thus, the meetinghouses were oriented so that the high canopied pulpit and Communion table were placed along the long side, and the pews were rotated to face it. (4)