The Architecture of the Meeting House:

From Rumney Marsh to Revere

ROBERT FORREY

A serious house on serious earth it isIn whose blent air all our compulsions meet,Are recognized, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete,Since someone will forever be surprisingA hunger in himself to be more serious,And gravitating with it to this ground,Which he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,If only that so many dead lie round.

“Church Going,” Philip Larkin

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I: Raising the Meeting House

he oak frame of the Rumney Marsh meeting house (shown above after the rotting steeple was removed)1 was ceremoniously raised three hundred years ago on July 10, 1710, in a bend of the old County Road, on what is now the corner of Beach and School Streets, in

Revere, a suburb just north of Boston. The year 1710 was very late for one of the oldest settlements in the Boston area to be raising its first meeting house. Boston had its first meeting house in 1632, Salem in 1635, and Marblehead around 1638. Lynn, just north of Rumney Marsh, had a meeting house as early as 1632, and Malden, just to the west, had one by 1649. But because of the importance in Puritan New England of meeting houses, which functioned as both a church and a town hall, Rumney Marsh residents might justifiably have felt, whatever qualms they may have had about the original steeple, “Better late than never.”

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The ubiquitous Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), who functioned as chair of the meeting house building committee, wrote in his diary (10 July 1710), “Mr. Jno Marion [a deacon in the Second Church of Boston] and I went to Rumney-Marsh to the Raising of their Meetinghouse. I drove a pin, gave a 5s bill, had a very good treat at Mr. Chievers’s [Thomas Cheever]; went and came by Winisimet [Ferry]” (Sewall 1973, 2: 639). Sewall was a well-to-do, generous, pious Puritan. The 5 shilling bill he gave at the raising was typical of the small gratuities he frequently dispensed, though he was capable of larger bequests, and with his time he was even more generous. He and two other members of the building committee were back in Rumney Marsh a week later (18 July 1710), on a hot day, to make arrangements about the windows with Samuel Stowers, a carpenter-builder who lived nearby in Mystic Side, which is now the city of Everett (Corey1899, 274, n. 32).

In 1983, a member of the Massachusetts Historical Commission wrote that the significance of the Rumney Marsh meeting house “lies in the fact that it is the earliest surviving frame church in Suffolk County and certainly one of the earliest in the Commonwealth” (Forrey 1987,102, n.). While the meeting house was originally Puritan, i.e., Congregational, it eventually became Unitarian. The claim would be made, around the time of its two-hundredth anniversary, in 1910, that it was the second oldest Unitarian meeting house in America. As its three hundredth anniversary approaches, in 2010, the meeting house, much altered, may also be among the oldest public buildings in continual use in Massachusetts. But the ultimate significance of the meeting house may not be any of these putative “firsts.” What makes it most noteworthy is that it is a building with a long, interesting, and neglected history, a history that is reflected in the architectural changes it has undergone over the centuries.

Those architectural changes, and the history they reflect, are the focus of this essay, but the architectural changes were accompanied by even greater religious changes: from Calvinism, to Unitarianism, to Freemasonry; that is, from the American nightmare—the “horrors of the Calvinist religion,” as M. Halsey Thomas called them (1973, 1: 345), to the American dream; from predestination, innate depravity, and damnation, to the onward and upward forever spirit of Unitarianism, which Horatio Alger, Sr., a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School, expressed in four essays in the Unitarian Advocate and Miscellany.2 His son Horatio Alger, Jr. would later

1 The engraver of the sketch, which appeared in Chamberlain’s A Documentary History of Chelsea, was Samuel Smith Kilburn (1831-1903), who did a similar sketch for the chapter Mellen Chamberlain wrote for The Memorial History of Boston, 4 vols. (Boston: 1886): 2: 378.

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give expression to Unitarian optimism, in a very different format, in his hundred or so so-called strive-and-succeed, rags-to-riches dime novels.

II: The Steeple

The farmers in Rumney Marsh had petitioned the selectmen in Boston for a meeting house. in 1706, but they were too poor to pay for it themselves. The money for the construction was provided by the Boston selectmen, who appointed the building committee, which was “impowered to direct, both as to the place and manner of Erecting S d meeting House”(Chamberlain 1908, II, 183). The committee and Sewall, who functioned as chairman, had the responsibility for the “manner of Erecting,” which probably included the responsibility of choosing the design. At the very least, the design would have required Sewall’s approval, but he probably was much more directly involved, both with the design and construction, than that. He would have been concerned not only with the windows but also with the steeple. Of the more than two-hundred meeting houses Marian C. Donnelly researched for The New England Meeting Houses of the Seventeenth Century, not a single one, until 1699, the last year of the century, had a steeple, and that was Boston’s Brattle Street meeting house (Donnelly 1968, 79-80).

In a conservative rural community such as Rumney Marsh, a steeple was a dramatic departure from seventeenth-century meeting house architecture. In 1710, the same year the Rumney Marsh meeting house was built, the minister in Chelmsford, who admired the design of the Brattle Street meeting house, tried unsuccessfully to persuade his building committee to include a steeple in the design of their new meeting house (Kennedy 1989, 243). The Chelmsford church records include the following misspelled entry: “Voted a concurrence to the Comitys proposalls in all things as to finishing the meting hous which we have agreed to build in chelmsford except the stepell” (Waters 1917, 677). Except the steeple! The Chelmsford congregation apparently wanted nothing to do with steeples, which were still associated in the minds of some New England Puritans with Catholic and Anglican churches.3

Given the liberal bent of the Brattle Street congregation, and especially of its founder, Thomas Brattle, it was not surprising they would be the first to depart from the staid, steeple-less meeting houses of the seventeenth century. And it was not surprising that the second meeting house in the Boston area to have a steeple would be the third meeting house of the First Church in Cambridge, built in 1706, since Thomas Brattle was on its building committee and his brother William was the minister. It was not just peculiar, however, but downright perplexing

2 Horatio Alger, Sr., published the four essays in the Unitarian Advocate and Miscellany in 1831 and 1832: “What Constitutes a Man a Christian?” (Sept. 1831); “On the Proem to St. John’s Gospel” (Jan. 1832); “The Testimony of the Apostles Concerning Our Lord” (Sept. 1832); and “The Imperfect Influence of Christianity” (Oct. 1832). What Alger does in the course of these essays is define the important differences between Unitarianism and Trinitarianism: For the Unitarians, God is one, not three; Christ is not the son of God; free will, not predestination, determines human destiny; and human nature is innately good, not evil.

3 In the abstract of his 1964 Princeton dissertation, Early Anglican Architecture 1558-1662, John M. Schnorrenberg explained why and in what ways early Anglican architecture bore such a close resemblance to Catholic architecture. “The Anglican Reformation was cautious and conservative; so was the first Anglican architecture” Because it too closely resembled Catholic architecture, Puritans were unhappy with the conservative Anglican architecture.

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that the third Congregational meeting house in the Boston area to have a steeple would be the stick-in-the-mud rural settlement of Rumney Marsh. Rural folk are proverbially resistant to social and religious change, so why would it be any different for architecture? There was no reason to think Rumney Marsh would be different from Chelmsford or other rural settlements in that respect

The original appropriation for the Rumney Marsh meeting house was a modest 100 pounds, but the Boston selectmen for some reason later reduced it to a paltry 50 pounds. To get a sense of the relative value of 50 pounds, William Brattle at the time of his death in 1717 was being paid 100 pounds annually as minister of the Cambridge church (McKenzie 1873, 138), and ministers were proverbially underpaid Cutting the appropriation in half meant the Rumney Marsh steeple would have to go without a bell. The expense of importing a bell from England would have been prohibitively expensive. The Malden meeting house had also been too poor to afford a bell, going without one for about thirty years, but the Rumney Marsh meeting house had to do without one for over a century, not getting one until 1832, during the pastorate of. Horatio Alger, Sr. (Shurtleff 1938, 434).

III: Puritan Architecture

Old-style Puritan meeting house in Malden (c. 1659)

“The Puritans who came to New England in 1630 had no intention of building steeples,” the author of The Steeples of Old New England wrote. “They had in fact no intention of building anything that resembled a church (Shivell 1999, 315). A typical seventeenth-century New England meeting house, Ahlstrom wrote, was “a plain and usually small building, with a

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centered pulpit, no holy altar (only a serviceable table) and no ‘popish’ tower until a much later day” (Ahlstrom 1973, 173). The older meeting houses in Lynn, Malden, Salem Village and Medford were built in the boxy, anti-papist style of the seventeenth century, when most meeting houses looked more like barns than churches. They were usually squarish, sometimes with four-sided roofs, sometimes with a bell turret or a cupola on the center of the roof, as in the Malden meeting house (shown above). In contrast to the Scholasticism-inspired European Gothic architecture, in which there was an obsession with division and sub-division, with ever greater elaboration (Panofsky 1985, 36), the Puritans preferred simplicity to complexity, the squarish to the rectangular, and the centered belfry or cupola to the steeple. They wanted no part of the presumptuous, prideful sky-scraping steeples preferred by papists and Anglicans.

If it had been left up to the conservative farmers of Rumney Marsh and the dour Thomas Cheever (1658-1749), their first minister, the architecture of their meeting house might have resembled the square, barn-like building in Malden, where, when much younger, Cheever had previously served as minister, from 1681 to1686. As a young man, Cheever had been a hotheaded radical, a cursing curate, and a Calvinist skirt chaser, but after being expelled from the Malden church and moving to Rumney Marsh, he became increasingly conservative and intractable the older he got, and he lived into his nineties. By then his eyes were fixed repentantly on an idealized Puritan past. But the Rumney Marsh meeting house was built with money provided by the selectmen of Boston, and the construction was overseen not by Cheever but by Sewall and several other Boston gentlemen, representing the selectmen. Consequently, the architecture of the meeting house reflected the prevailing ethos of Boston, not Rumney Marsh, and there was a distinct, even striking, difference between the two. Boston and Rumney Marsh were only six miles from each other, but they were, in spite of their proximity, worlds apart. “How close and yet how far” was a recurring refrain in the history of the town.

IV: The Godfather

A long-haired rather than a closely cropped Puritan, Samuel Sewall (shown left) strongly disapproved of wigs for men (even for bald men). He also disapproved of mixed dancing and the celebration of Christmas. But his cultural and religious horizons had been broadened and his tastes refined by travel, both in New and old England. As Rick Kennedy pointed out, Sewall had shown no particular interest in domestic or church architecture prior to a trip to England, in 1689. But under the tutelage of his fellow American Thomas Brattle, the future founder and designer of the Brattle Street Church, Sewall in England developed an interest in architecture. He went sightseeing with Brattle, taking in cathedrals and castles, as well as smaller public and private buildings, sometimes carefully measuring their length and width with Brattle’s ruler, as if a structure could not be fully appreciated, or understood Samuel

Sewall, godfather and architectus ingenio of the meeting house, until its dimensions and floor plan were known. As a New England Puritan abroad, Sewall became something of a budding architect. The two Americans showed a special interest in the architecture of churches and

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meeting houses. They went to the town of Deal, in Kent, for example, for the express purpose of seeing a new meeting house, and a few days later went to look at an old church that had recently added a steeple. In his diary, Sewall described church towers and steeples in England without any suggestion that they might be specters of Papist corruption or Anglican complicity. However begrudgingly and provincially, he seemed impressed by them. In visiting Coventry, where his

grandfather had been mayor, he went into the steeple of an Anglican church and later described the gilded cross on top of it as “a noble thing” (1973, I:209), a curious observation given the negative attitude of New England Puritans toward both steeples and crosses.

John Calvin, as Donnelly pointed out (1968, 20), did not show any interest in church architecture in general and in steeples in particular. The Catholic cathedral of St. Pierre, in Geneva, which he appropriated as his ecclesiastical home, was historically and conspicuously Catholic in its pointed architecture and exquisite steeple (Walker 1906, 174, 194), but that apparently did not bother him. He did not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater or the cathedrals with the Catholics. He criticized the idolatrous icons and art placed, and the false rites practiced and doctrines preached, within Catholic churches, but he did not criticize the architecture of those churches..

It would have been interesting to know what Sewall’s reactions might have been to the St. Pierre cathedral, and its steeple (shown left), but his travels did not take him to Switzerland. He did see several of the famous cathedrals of England, including Canterbury, which he first viewed at dusk, describing it as “a very lofty and magnificent building,” but then adding a Puritan reproof, “but of little use.” The cathedral at Salisbury he found “very neat and stately” and its spire “excellent for height and beauty,” adding no reproofs. At Windsor Castle he measured or somehow obtained the width, length, and height of the Queen’s bedchamber, the King’s public dining room, etc., with no comment (Sewall 1973, 1: 193, 198, 215). He carried his expanded architectural awareness and unPuritan tolerance back to Boston. Abbott L. Cummings has shown how Sewall, among others, broke with tradition by adapting English Renaissance elements to domestic architecture in Boston (Cummings 1983, 48-49). Since domestic architecture influenced ecclesiastical architecture in Boston (Cummings 1979, 10), Sewall apparently played a role, however small and indirect, in the changes in meeting house design that took place in New England in the eighteenth century. But in regard to the design of the Rumney Marsh meeting house, his role was probably large and direct. Architecturally, as well as in other ways, he could be called the

godfather of the Rumney Marsh meeting house. In the architectural terminology of the time, the architectus ingenio was “the one who conceived the form of the building and was responsible for overseeing the builders” (Kennedy 1989, 239). As Thomas Brattle was the architectus ingenio for the Brattle Street, Sewall was for the Rumney Marsh meeting house. Though consistently

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pious and ploddingly faithful to the New England Way prior to his visit to England, Sewall afterwards would occasionally glance, if only with one eye, at the steepled, unPuritan future. He was not conscious of and would have been mortified to realize the liberal changes he was helping to bring about. Following the example of the Brattle Street steeple, the Rumney Marsh steeple pointed not just up, to heaven, but also ahead, prophetically, to the future, to the Enlightenment and Unitarianism.

Sewall has been called one of the last of the Puritans, and he was to the end of his long life “a true lover of the First Ways of New England,” to borrow one of his phrases (Sewall 1973, 2: 734), but in some respects he was a forerunner of the Unitarians. Not only was he a supporter of the Half-Way Covenant, which ameliorated the church status of non-communicants in Congregational churches, he was among the first New England Puritans to plead for the rights of Negroes and women. Because of Sewall’s sympathy for Negroes, and his tepid support of the Mathers in their feud with Harvard, Cotton Mather in a pique had accused him of being “one who pleaded much for Negros,” but who treated his father, Increase, “worse than a Neger” (Sewall 1973, I, 454-455). Mather was in effect calling Sewall a “Neger lover.” On the basis of the sympathy he expressed for women in his essay “Talitha Cumi” (1925),” Sewall could also have been called a “woman lover,” and since as architectus ingenio he bore at least some responsibility for the design of the Rumney Marsh meeting house, a “steeple lover.”

V: Race, Class, and Sex

The exterior of the Rumney Marsh meeting house and the steeple in particular may have pointed to the future, and the rights of man, as Thomas Paine would define them, but the interior of the meeting house revealed the unrighteousness of man—more specifically the undemocratic, racist and sexist prejudices of the Anglo-Saxon males who dominated Puritan New England. In his diary entry for the formal gathering of the First Church of Christ at Rumney Marsh, which took place on October 19, 1715, five years after the raising of the meeting house, The five year delay between the raising of the meeting house and the formation of the First Church and ordination of Cheever may have been the result of differences on whether he was the best candidate. Partly on the grounds that there were “great divisions being among us,” there had been opposition to having a meeting house (Shurtleff 1938, 421), and there may have been opposition to having Cheever as minister. In any event, when Sewall attending the gathering of the church, he mentioned “sitting in my Pue; ‘tis a good one, which never sat in before (Sewall 1973, 2: 802). Sewall would only rarely sit in his pew, for he was a member of Boston’s Second Church. The seating arrangements in the Rumney Marsh meeting house reflected the typical segregated, hierarchical character of the Puritan community. Sewall may have been ahead of his time in supporting the rights of Negroes and women, but overhead in the meeting house he had been the archetectus ingenio of were galleries segregated on the basis of race and sex. There was, according to Shurtleff, a gallery up on one side for female slaves and a gallery on the other side for male slaves. Slave galleries were then called “slaves’ pews,” and in the racist slang of a later day “nigger heaven.” There was, if Shurtleff was correct, a third gallery of the meeting house, on the western side, for white women. All four groups—white males, white females, black males, and black females—had, according to Shurtleff, separate entrances to the meeting house, which sounds hard to believe. Sewall relied in part on information supplied by Chamberlain in his Documentary History (1908 2: 302). In a chapter on Rumney Marsh in The Memorial History of Boston, Chamberlain wrote that the doors at the front and rear of the meetinghouse were for male and female slaves who were segregated in the galleries (1886, 2: 378, n.).

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There was also, among the propertied white males on the ground floor, a further form of segregation, because the location and size of a pew reflected the financial and social standing of its owner. The bigger the pew and the closer it was to the pulpit, the more important the man who occupied it. Sewall was one of the most important Puritans in Massachusetts. When he described his pew as a “good one,” he probably meant that, among other advantages, it was close to the pulpit, in contrast to the pew-less who sat in the back on benches and the slaves, up in the galleries. Instead of each man and woman being equal before God, the Rumney Marsh meeting house tended to reaffirm class, racial, and gender hierarchies.

Edmund W. Sinnott pointed out that, “As did the Puritan himself, the meetinghouse changed with the years. His houses of worship faithfully mirrored the alterations in his social and religious life. . . . The meetinghouse has always illuminated the character of the men who worshiped in it, and a study of its architectural evolution provides us with a vivid insight into the changes that took place in the Puritan himself.” According to Sinnott, the shift from the older, squarer, medieval-style to the Renaissance-influenced, rectangular, steepled meeting house occurred early in the eighteenth century. Ironically, he suggested historians of New England should pay close attention to what was happening around 1710. That the 1710 Rumney Marsh meeting house escaped Sinnott’s notice is understandable since it was located in the boondocks of Boston, and was historically overshadowed by bigger, more important and more illustrious meeting houses. No meeting house in the Boston area could compare in scale and beauty to Boston’s Old South [Congregational] Church, which was built in 1729. The earliest example of the new architectural style that Sinnott could find was the Nantucket church, built around 1711, and the West Barnstable church, built in 1717 (Sinnott 1963, 13, 19, 42-43). In the steeple chase, the Brattle Street meeting house (1699) was first, the Cambridge meeting house was second (1706), and the Rumney Marsh meeting house (1710), apparently, was third.

There were no major architectural changes to the meeting house in the first hundred years of its existence. There were, however, several minor ones. In the false hope that the meeting house was belatedly going to get a bell, the platform in the steeple was repaired in 1745. Other minor repairs were recorded in the church records. For example, in 1771, money was raised to pay for boards, shingles, nails, and labor for what was already being referred to as the “old meetinghouse” (Chamberlain 1908, 2: 297). In part to accommodate the sickly Unitarian minister Joseph Tuckerman (1778-1844), the first stove was installed in 1817, which would have required some minor carpentry. But it was not until 1823 that the first important renovation occurred. In the process of painting the meeting house, it was discovered that the steeple had rotted beyond repair. Church records are silent on who made the decision to replace it with the cupola shown in the engraving by Kilburn.

VI: Rival Churches

The conservative members of the First Church, who called themselves Evangelicals rather than Calvinists, found the liberal Unitarian theology Tuckerman had introduced unacceptable, and they broke away in 1828, establishing the Evangelical Congregational Society and building a rival church on the Salem Turnpike (now called Broadway), about a half a mile away. The Evangelicals called it the Orthodox Church, though it was also sometimes referred to as the Evangelical Church. Two decades later, the Evangelical Congregational Society had outgrown the church on the Salem Turnpike and built a large new one, in 1849, almost directly across from the meeting house, on the old County Road. It was probably no coincidence that the “new” Congregational (Evangelical) Church was located almost directly across the road from the “old”

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Congregational (now Unitarian) meeting house. In choosing a site across from the meeting house, the Evangelicals appeared to be throwing down the gauntlet and challenging their rivals to a duel, not unlike the later infamous one between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. Unfortunately for the First Church, it would turn out to be, in the analogy, Alexander Hamilton.

Just seven years after the 1849 construction of the new rival church across the road by the Evangelical Congregationalists, the Unitarian Congregationalists, in 1856, spurred by the women’s Sewing Circle, undertook a major renovation of the meeting house that resulted in a virtually new building. “The frame of the building is immensely strong, and upon it a nearly new church will be constructed,” a reporter wrote in the Boston Herald in 1856. (The undated newspaper clipping is pasted into a church record book in the City Clerk’s Office at the Revere City Hall.)

Meeting house after the major 1856 renovation

The meeting house was turned around ninety degrees, which had the effect, intended or not, of directly confronting—of going head to head—with the rival church across the road. It was during the 1856 renovation that the arrangement of the interior space of the meeting house was radically changed, with the pulpit being moved to what became the back of the building, on the west, and at what became the front, on the east, a main entrance was constructed through the base of the cupola tower. What was previously the main entrance, on what had been the north side of the meeting house, was eliminated (Shurtleff 1938, 435). These changes were even more significant than the original steeple had been, because aligning the interior space along the long axis had been obligatory in Puritan New England meeting house architecture in the seventeenth and on into the eighteenth century. Even after meeting houses became rectangular in shape, with

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steeples, the pulpit continued to be located at the center of one of the long sides (White 1964,106-110).

The 1856 renovation was a major architectural change, but the theological changes that had been taking place ever since Tuckerman had become minister in 1801 were even greater. The church that had begun theologically in 1715 as very conservative had by 1876 become so liberal that in that year the church engaged a minister who if he was not a closet atheist when he arrived certainly was openly so after he left. Lemuel K. Washburn (1846-1927) eventually became the second most notorious atheist in the United States, second only to his hero, Robert Ingersoll (Forrey, 2004). It would be hard to imagine any two ministers who had ever preached in the meeting house being the polar opposites that Cheever and Washburn were. The turnaround theologically in the meeting house from 1715 to 1876 was not ninety but a hundred and eighty degrees.

Rival (renovated) Congregational Church, 1884

In 1884, reflecting the congregation’s continued growth, the Evangelical Congregational Church building underwent a major renovation. The auditorium was raised, a vestry, a ladies’ parlor, a kitchen were added. So were stained glass windows and an organ, aesthetic additions their seventeenth-century Puritan ancestors would not have tolerated. Architecturally, the

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renovated Evangelical Congregational Church had become domesticated, a woman’s touch evident throughout. A woman’s place was no longer just the kitchen and the parlor at home but the kitchen and ladies’ parlor of the church.

The Evangelical Congregationalists renamed their church the First Congregational Church of Revere, considering themselves, rather the Unitarian-Congregationalists across the road, the true heirs of Cheever and First Church of Christ at Rumney Marsh. The Evangelical-Congregationalists felt that even though they did not occupy the meeting house, they were the ones carrying on its Puritan spirit, the stained glass windows, the organ and the auditorium stage notwithstanding. But the architectural renovations in the Evangelical Congregational church building speak volumes about the social and religious changes that were taking place in the town, and New England, in the nineteenth century. It was not just the Unitarians who were abandoning the old-time fire-and-brimstone religion for odd-fellow. good works gemütlichkeit. While paying lip service to original sin, and holding on to the Trinity, Calvinistic Evangelicals were easing up on damnation and focusing more on the potluck than the Last Supper.

Following the 1884 renovation, the Evangelicals inaccurately and somewhat presumptuously renamed their church not the first Orthodox, or First Evangelical Church, but the First Congregational Church of Revere. In response, the actual first Congregational church, which began in 1715 as the First Church of Christ in Rumney Marsh, started identifying itself, for the first time since its founding, as the First Congregational Church. So the town had rival First Congregational churches when it was not certain, given the successive waves of non-Protestant immigrants, that the town could any longer support one. The irony is that by the time the church that had started out as the First Church of Christ in Rumney Marsh first identified itself as Congregational, about a century and half after its founding, it was already Unitarian in everything but name. But like other New England Congregational churches that had made a similar gradual, quiet—some would say surreptitious—transition from Trinitarianism to Unitarianism, it chose not to admit it was a Unitarian church. If all the churches that had become Unitarian admitted as much, Congregationalists might have had legal grounds for claiming they, not the Unitarians, should have control of the church.

With the ordination of the androgynous looking, intensely emotional, proto-Unitarian Joseph Tuckerman in the First Church, in 1801, a new era can be said to have begun in the town, an era in which both the First Church and, later, the rival Evangelical Congregational Church underwent changes that Anne Douglas characterized, in the title of her 1977 book, as The Feminization of New England Culture. Once the primary masculine leader, the alpha male in the community, the Puritan parson had become transformed into a nurturing, feminized Unitarian minister. In keeping with the transformation of the jealous, vengeful God of the Old into the loving God of the New Testament, the Son of the three-gods-in-one came to overshadow the omnipotent Father. In the domestication of New England Protestantism, women had become the mainstay not just in the meeting house but also in the Evangelical church across the road. In the nineteenth century, the business of America had become business, men’s business, and religion had become, by default, largely women’s business.

VII: Doomed by Demographics

The presence of the rival Congregational church across the road proved fatal for the Unitarian church, which had difficulty coming to terms with the fact that the town was better suited to Evangelicals than Unitarians, more hospitable, that is, to conservative than liberal

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Protestants. It did not help when, as part of the Unitarian overexpansion that took place after the Civil War, that construction of a small Unitarian church was begun in the Beachmont section of Revere in 1885, though the building was not finished until 1889. The founding of Unity Chruch, as it was named, was as unwise as the 1887 renovation of the the meeting house. By 1906, Unity Church dissolved. In the meanwhile, the number of Evangelicals in the rival Congregational church increased slowly in the late nineteenth century, while the number of Unitarians in the meeting house, proportionally, declined.

In spite of that decline, the Unitarians in the First Church refused to take a back seat to the Congregationalists. Better educated and prominent in business and the professions, as well as in town government, the Unitarians, particularly the women, felt they were superior, more cultured and refined. They were, judging by the programs they held in the auditorium of the meeting house, where it was Mozart and tableau vivant while on the stage across the road it was more homespun fare. The Unitarians may have been justified in thinking of themselves a cut above the more countrified Congregationalists, but they probably also deserved their reputation for being standoffish and cold. That’s apparently what Emerson had in mind when he complained in the “Divinity School Address” (1838) about the “corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street.” But it was not the Unitarians’ alleged lifelessness but their low birth rate that was their Achilles’ heel, at least in Revere. Their problem was not so much their lack of religious enthusiasm but their reluctance, or inability, to propagate sufficiently.

It is observable historically that the more educated, elevated and refined a group, class, or nation becomes, and the higher its standard of living, the lower its birthrate, while the lower classes propagate disproportionately. The Unitarians were doomed demographically. In seventeenth century New England, the Puritans had been prolific breeders. Given the high mortality rate among children, they had to be in order to perpetuate the colony. Sewall and his first wife had fourteen children. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when infant mortality rates had sharply declined, it was the immigrants and especially the Catholics who were prolific. Protestant Revere, and Unitarians in particular, became numerically overwhelmed by fecund Catholic immigrants. The birthrates of the Irish- and Italian-Americans were as high as they were in part because the Catholic Church strongly opposed any form of birth control.

In the early nineteenth century, the meeting house became the battle ground between conservatives and liberals, but after the Civil War, with the conservatives ensconced in their own church, the split in the meeting house was between moderate and radical Unitarians. In July 1877, at a meeting of what was called pointedly the “legal parish committee of the First Church,” which was led by a justice of the peace, it was decided to paint inside and outside the building. While the repairs on the one hundred and sixty-seven year old building were no doubt needed, keeping it closed for the rest of the summer was obviously an attempt to prevent Lemuel K. Washburn, who had recently been expelled by the “legal parish committee,” from conducting services. The parish committee had gone so far as changing the locks, but Washburn and his supporters gained entrance with a skeleton key. Not the kind of Unitarian minister who could be accused of feminizing New England culture, Washburn once inside got into a wrestling match with the justice of the peace. When services were resumed that fall, the meeting house had a new minister. However, when the church attempted to summon the congregation to hear the new minister’s inaugural sermon, it was discovered that somebody—possibly a supporter of Washburn—had removed the clapper from the bell, the same bell it had taken the church over a century to acquire. An enterprising member of the congregation got a hammer, climbed up into the cupola, and struck the bell. Once settled into the recently painted interior, the new minister

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preached his inaugural sermon, taking as his text, according to a local newspaper, The Chelsea Telegraph & Pioneer, “Lord, what wilt Thou have me do?” (20 Oct.1877, p. 2).

When he left the meeting house, Washburn took a splinter group with him, establishing yet another rival group, called the First Independent Society, which held services in the Revere Town Hall. The First Church could not afford to lose any more members, even atheists, and it certainly could not afford another major renovation of the meeting house. But when the Evangelists renovated and expanded their church in 1884, the Unitarians in 1887 followed suit in a copycat renovation (shown left). The meeting house was raised to add a vestry and a ladies’ parlor, and the cupola was replaced by a tower steeple that closely resembled the one across the road.

Meeting house after 1887 renovation

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Unitarianism had emerged from the Civil War as a very prosperous denomination, or association, as it preferred to call itself, and Boston was the capital of American Unitarianism. William Ellery Channing, considered the father of American Unitarianism, had been the lifelong minister of Boston’s Federal Street Church, which was thought to be the wealthiest Unitarian congregation in the country. The central offices of the American Unitarian Association (A.U.A.), its treasury overflowing, were located on exclusive Beacon Hill. With its deep pockets, the A.U.A. had established a Church Building Loan Fund, which made it possible for less prosperous Unitarian societies, particularly those in rural districts or in more remote states, to build or renovate churches.

Revere was only six miles from Boston, but because of its troubled history and tradition of rural poverty, it was still in another world—economically, socially, and culturally. The Unitarian church in Revere had come to depend on a small annual grant-in-aid from the A.U.A., which helped pay the minister's salary. But instead of swallowing their pride, economizing, and adjusting to their loss of status, Revere’s Unitarians borrowed from the A.U.A. Building Loan Fund to help pay for the second major renovation in thirty years. The cost of the 1887 renovation was about $4,700; the A.U.A. loan was for $2,000, which sounds modest, but after twenty years the church had not repaid half the loan.

An estimated four hundred people crowded the renovated meeting house for the dedication in April 1888. The size of the Unitarian congregation was considerably less than four hundred, so among the crowd were probably at least some curious Congregationalists and possibly a few of the radical Unitarians who had followed the free-thinking Washburn out of the church. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, while the Congregational congregation continued to grow gradually, the Unitarian congregation continued to shrink inexorably, making it increasingly difficult to pay off the A.U.A. building loan. Between 1887 and 1891 there had been two recessions and in 1899-1900 there had been a third. By 1898, when Samuel A. Eliot became the president of the A.U.A., it no longer had the deep pockets it had a quarter century earlier. The turn of the century was belt-tightening time for the A.U.A., and the fiscally and theologically conservative Eliot seemed a born belt-tightener. He cut back on grants-in-aid and required that outstanding loans be paid off as soon as possible. In a move that reflected the hard economic times, he encouraged struggling Unitarian churches to combine, where possible, with their Congregational cousins.

Considering the estrangement and underlying bitterness that had developed in the town in the nineteenth century between conservative and liberal Protestants, a reconciliation between Unitarians and Congregationalist was unlikely, if not impossible. What stood in the way, first, was theology, including the question, “Is God one or three-in-one?” There was also the issue of the role of fire-and-brimstone preaching It was the case with some Protestants that when the hell-fires cooled, when God lost his Old Testament punitiveness, religion lost a lot of its morbid appeal.

But the social and cultural differences were an even bigger impediment. In spite of their precarious finances, there is no evidence the Unitarians in Revere ever considered reconciling with their Congregational cousins. Once the elite group in town, the Unitarians had outlived their prime but not their pride. But even if the Unitarians had been willing to bury the hatchet, it is unlikely the Congregationalists would have been interested. In Revere, at least, Congregationalists had proved they could survive without Unitarians, but the Unitarians had not proved they could survive without Congregationalists. Since their buildings had become quite

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similar architecturally, why couldn’t the churches become similar theologically? Perhaps because, as John Calvin, the ultimate authority for Congregationalists had shown, the architecture of a church was not important; it was the architecture of the Church, the creed, that was crucial. The presence or absence of a steeple or the shape of the floor plan was neither here nor there, but what the people in a church believed about God, the sacraments, sin, etc., those things were of infinite importance because upon them depended salvation, at least according to believers.

VIII: First (and Last) Female Minister

In 1910, the two hundredth anniversary of the raising of the meeting house, Mary L. Leggett (1854-1938), having been preceded by at least twenty-six male ministers, became the first female to occupy the pulpit (Weis 1947, 392);. She would also turn out to be the last minister of either sex to occupy the pulpit. Women had become the mainstay of the First Church during the nineteenth century, from Tuckerman’s pastorate onward, so it was only fitting that it should have, however belatedly, a female minister. Leggett did not have a tarnished past, as Cheever, the first minister, had, but she had had a somewhat troubled one, never staying long in one place, moving back and forth between the Northeast and the Southwest. As Cheever had been, she was in the twilight of her career. She was hired as a kind of hospice nurse for the church, which was terminally ill. It was not a position a male minister with any prospects would likely be interested in, not if he was compos mentis. One of Leggett’s predecessors believed he was “leading the life of the Second Christ,” and that he would not shave, bathe, or pay his bills, A.U.A. Secretary-at-Large Louis C. Cornish wrote to a Henry M. Williams (A.U.A. Archives 22 April, 1915).

Leggett did not suffer from delusions, but she may have suffered a nervous breakdown earlier in her career. In any event, she was hampered by psychological and personality problems. Admitting to having led a stressful life, and of having been high strung, she referred in a letter to having been stretched to the breaking point by harsh use. But how many single women struggling to make their way in a man’s world, where at least some males in authority occasionally acted as if they were Christ—how many women in such a world would not develop emotional or psychological problems? Leggett could not escape sexism even in the liberal Unitarian movement, even from the highest officials. No less than the president of the A.U.A., Samuel A. Eliot, believed a woman’s place was in the home, not the pulpit (Wright 1989, 100).

The opportunity that opened up for Leggett in Revere, late in what was at best a checkered career, might have seemed providential. She appeared grateful, but what she was being given was not so much a second as a final chance. Fifty-four years old when she was hired, she may have had premonitions that this opportunity was the last she would have. Naturally, after so many disappointments, she wanted to make it last as long and be as successful as possible.

An ad hoc parish committee, the Committee of Ten, as it was called, had been established in 1916. with Stanley T. Fenno, a science teacher at Revere High School, as its chairman. A descendant of John Fenno, a businessman who had been a pillar of the First Church and Horatio Alger’s father-in-law, Stanley Fenno may have reflected the shift of loyalty of the town’s males away from Protestantism, and Unitarianism in particular, toward Masonry, where men could be men, and instead of being divided by denominationalism, and distracted by women, could be united in a sacred, semi-secret brotherhood. The avowed aim of the committee, as Fenno explained in a letter to Louis C. Cornish, was “to raise funds to pay off the

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church’s indebtedness” (A.U.A. Archives 26 Oct. 1916). Curiously, Leggett does not appear to have been a member of the committee. If she wasn’t, it was possible no woman was. Women may have still been the mainstay of the church, but men were still the masters..

Perhaps with some justification, the Committee of Ten, or at least Fenno, may have concluded the First Church was a hopeless case. He appeared to have a hidden agenda. If Leggett was not the pawn of the Committee of Ten, or of Fenno, she was at least the fall gal. Subsequent events suggest the aim of committee was not to save the church for the Unitarians but to save the meeting house for the Masons. The stonewalling and obstructionism of the committee may have been Fenno’s way of preventing the A.U.A. from taking title to the meeting house. At one point, the A.U.A., at Leggett’s suggestion, had drawn up an understanding whereby the A.U.A. would suspend the church’s debt, take title to the meeting house, and hold it in trusteeship until such time as the Revere Unitarian Society could repay the remainder of the building loan. Leggett had been the one to first propose this understanding, but at the last minute the rug was pulled out from under her and the A.U.A., apparently by Fenno and the Committee of Ten.

If she had not realized it before she was hired, at a meager fifty dollars a month, Leggett likely did soon afterwards: the church was in its death throes. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, during successive tides of immigration, waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants arrived in Revere, and a number of Protestants moved out in what could be called Protestant flight. By one estimate, there were only thirty to forty Unitarians left in Revere by 1918. Undeterred by demographics, the plucky Leggett made a valiant if somewhat desperate effort to save the church. In her campaign, she took advantage of the two hundredth anniversary of the raising of the meeting house to make it the focus of her fundraising efforts. She made the case that the meeting house was a venerable architectural monument that must, along with the church, be preserved. She sent out appeals for funds on stationery that included the Kilburn sketch and a more recent photo of the meetinghouse in the letterhead.

If the meeting house was old and somewhat the worse for wear, and in need of repair, she felt it had, like herself, a lot of life left. “There is really life left in this ancient Church,” she wrote. Cornish, “altho’ the financial difficulties have nearly smothered its spiritual flame” (A.U.A. Archives 10 Oct. 1916). She was well seasoned but not yet ready for retirement. Good at public relations, she organized a commemoration for the two hundredth anniversary of the raising of the meeting house, to take place on July 10, 1910. With her talent for public relations, she got the local newspaper, the Revere Journal, to announce on the front page that the commemoration is “probably the most important anniversary observation that the people of Revere have ever been interested in.” She was good at promoting herself as well. The Revere Journal would later claim she showed “glowing zeal and great executive ability. She aims to make the church a centre from which all good things radiate” (4 Feb. 1911).

She also showed a talent for stretching the truth, a useful tool in public relations. She claimed that in her first year as minister fifty new members had joined the congregation, and in 1916, when things were even worse, that nineteen more had. But church records show throughout her pastorate a decrease, not an increase numbers. Not surprisingly, her fundraising efforts fell well below what she had hoped. Not only was she not able to pay off the building loan to the A.U.A., but she also had difficulty raising money for the maintenance of the building. The meeting house suffered, perennially it seemed, from a leaking roof.

By 1916, when Leggett reached the age of sixty and the church in extremis, Cornish suggested she retire and apply for financial assistance from a Unitarian relief fund. She

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responded plaintively in a letter, “O, but it is not relief that I want, but salvation from my fear of do-nothing-ism.” In a strained conceit that mixed metaphors from medicine and music, she added, “I fear I should be stricken with ‘Infantile Paralysis,’ (second childhood) if I permitted myself to believe that I must be laid upon the shelf—however tenderly, in this my vigorous prime, with every power attuned (by much discordant tightening of the life-harp) to the minor chords of my faith. Would it not be the waste of the wisdom of experience? O, but I know only too well that far wiser and nobler ministers than I have been thus doomed” (A.U.A. Archives 10 Oct. 1916).

With a heavy heart, Leggett resigned her ministry on January 1, 1917, and the church, with the future of the meeting house in limbo, dissolved not long afterwards. In October 1919,. Harold L. Pickett, a Unitarian minister in Woburn, made an on-site evaluation in Revere for the A.U.A. regarding the possibility of reviving the Unitarian church. The A.U.A. apparently believed it might somehow still come into possession of the meeting house, though a transfer of title that had taken place a few months earlier would seem to have closed the door to that possibility. Pickett reported in a hastily written note to the A.U.A., that though the meeting house was purportedly the second oldest Unitarian church building in America, the future of Unitarianism in Revere looked hopeless. “The Society greatly depleted by deaths, and by the young people moving away. 30 or forty members remaining. Neighborhood changing its population; Jews coming in by the hundreds. Not much hope of reviving interest or adding to Unitarian membership sufficiently to warrant settlement of a minister.” He went on to point out, “Some members of the [Unitarian] parish thought of using funds for a scholarship for some deserving student. Others thought of putting of it in the hands of A.U.A. in trust. At present it is accumulating against a time ‘when they see what turns up’ ” (A.U.A. Archives 3 Oct. 1919). In 1923, Miss Susan L. Pierce of Revere had complained to the A.U.A. of the lack of accountability of the money from the sale of the meeting house. N.E. Field, the Secretary of the A.U.A., in a reply to Miss Pierce wrote, “Dr. Eliot and I have gone over the conditions in Revere and we both share with you a considerable degree of uneasiness with reference to the parish funds” (A.U.A. Archives 6 Dec. 1923). What eventually “turned up,” about twenty years after the sale of the meeting house, was that the bulk of the money from the sale of the meeting house was turned over not to a deserving student or a deserving Unitarian but to a Mason, Benjamin Shurtleff, for the publication of his history of Revere.

Unitarianism may have been dead in Revere, but Leggett was not, and where there was life there was, for someone who believed in “onward-and-upward forever,” hope. At the very least, she managed to end her spinsterhood. In 1923, at the age of sixty-nine, she married the seventy-five-year-old. George Willis Cooke (1848-1923), a Unitarian minister and the author of a history of Unitarianism. They made their home in Revere, but whatever security she they might have experienced was short-lived. for he died a week after the wedding. She died herself fifteen years later, in 1938, in a nursing home at the age of eighty-one, on the shelf she had so much dreaded.

IX: Meeting House, Masons, and the Revering of America

Masonry may not be a religion, as Masons insist, but it is a religious organization, based on the belief in a Supreme Being, or Master Architect. The aim of Masonry is, according to one authority, “To enlighten the mind, arouse the conscience, stimulate the noble and generous

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impulses of the human heart. It seeks to promote the best type of manhood based upon the practice of Brotherly Love and the Golden Rule” (Voorhis 1979, 69).

The recently formed Seaview [Masonic] Lodge of Revere had voted (2 July 1919) to accept the recommendation of its building committee and purchase the meeting house. At the annual meeting of the Revere Unitarian Society (5 Aug. 1919)—this was after the Unitarian Church had dissolved—a majority of its members voted to sell the meeting house and land to the Revere Masonic Association for $7,000, a sum that was less than half the value the town assessor had placed upon the building. That assessment had been made before the inflationary war years, so the post-war value was probably higher. When the transaction was formally concluded (21 Aug. 1919), Walter A. Janvrin represented the Unitarian Society and Arthur B. Curtis, treasurer of the Seaview Lodge, represented the Revere Masonic Association. Although he was kind and generous toward Leggett, Janvrin appears to have been involved in a conflict of interest since, in addition to being an important member of the Unitarian church, he was also a brother in the Star of Bethlehem Lodge, in Chelsea, and an honorary member of the Seaview Lodge. The Masons paid only $2,000 down for the meeting house, taking out a mortgage for the remaining $5,000 with a Revere bank. The A.U.A. would later privately question the propriety of the sale of the meeting house to the Masons, and express concern over who had control of the $7,000 and the accruing interest..

Because the Masons were a somewhat secretive organization, details about the history of the Seaview Lodge, including architectural changes they made, are hard to come by. Masons believe in architecture, but they also believe that the history of each lodge is ultimately their secret. As with Masonic lodges generally, the Seaview Lodge limited membership to men, who would have had little use for the ladies’ parlor and the stage where the Unitarian ladies had presented historical tableaux to the public. The Masonic Ritual of Building emphasized the need for privacy and isolation and called for surrounding high walls, hidden rooms and closets, which may or may not have been present in the Masonic renovated meeting house. In Masonic Temples: Freemasonry, Ritual Architecture, and Masculine Archetypes, William D. Moore pointed out that when a Masonic group could not build a new temple or lodge, they acquired local buildings and converted them by reconfiguring their interiors. Churches were among the buildings they acquired for conversion (Moore 2006, 129). Between July 2, when they took title to the meeting house, and October 3, 1919, the date of the first meeting of the Seaview Lodge, the interior of the building presumably underwent at least some changes to meet the special needs of the Masonic ceremonies and rituals.

“Many changes and renovations have been made in our historic Temple since its acquisition,” Shurtleff wrote in “The Old Town Meetinghouse,” a pamphlet published in 1939 on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Masons’ acquisition of the meeting house, but what those many changes were Shurtleff did not reveal. In his History of Revere, he pointed out that the meeting house was sold “at a very low figure with the understanding that the Unitarian Society should hold services there free of charge, and, also, have other privileges”(Shurtleff 1938, 436). But the understanding Shurtleff alluded to must have been an informal one, without legal basis, for there is no mention of it in the deed, and there is no evidence the few Unitarians remaining in Revere made use of the building after the Masons purchased it. Any “hidden rooms and closets” they might have added could help create the isolation and secrecy appropriate for Masonic rituals and ceremonies, but not for Unitarian baptisms, weddings, and funerals. When William T. Janvrin died in 1919, his funeral was held in the meeting house, or

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Revere Masonic Temple as it was referred to in the Revere Journal, which reported “It was strictly a Masonic funeral,” although Leggett gave the eulogy (13 Dec. 18, p. 5).

The architectural changes in the meeting house in its Masonic phase remain a mystery. In Masonic lodges, there were many degrees, or steps, in their hierarchical organization. But just how hierarchicalism might have affected the architecture of the interior of the Seaview Lodge is unknown. But hierarchy may not have been the only Masonic characteristic that needed to be accommodated architecturally. Moore claims Masonic lodges at the beginning of the twentieth century were trying to encourage four modes of masculinity in its members, and four different kinds of rooms were devoted to those four modes. If Moore was right, Masons believed architecture was tied to masculinity, as they believed it was to so many things. But, again, we don’t know to what degree, if at all, the Seaview Lodge might have been engaged in encouraging any variety of masculinity among its members. The peculiar architecture that might have been associated with those modes of masculinity efforts, if it ever existed, has disappeared down the stream of time. But if Moore is right, if the Seaview Lodge encouraged masculinity, what are we to make of the odd fact, known to several generations of Revere residents, that Benjamin Shurtleff, the descendant of an old Boston family, the author of the History of Revere, and a proud member of the Seaview Lodge, was a pedophile?

The publication of Shurtleff’s History of the Town of Revere, the Seaview Lodge’s earlier acquisition of the historic meeting house, and the still earlier renaming of the town, in 1871, after Paul Revere—were attempts by Masons to call attention to what they saw as the great but under-appreciated and sometimes maligned Masonic heritage. Longfellow’s Paul Revere, and the steeple—“One if by land, two if by sea”— became enduring icons of the myth of New England and, by extension, of America, as in the painting by Grant Wood. Not only Paul Revere, but fifty-two of the fifty-seven signers of the Declaration of Independence, including. John Adams, John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, as well as George Washington, had been Masons. So was. Horatio Alger, Sr., the sixth permanent minister in the meeting house.

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Paul Revere’s Ride by Grant Wood

The town of Revere, when it had been combined with Chelsea, had been a Masonic stronghold. But an anti-Masonic movement sprang up in the United States in 1826 after the Masons were accused of murdering a member who threatened to reveal their secrets. Growth of the organization under those circumstances was very difficult. In Massachusetts, no new lodges were formed between 1827 and 1843. The Masonic drought in Massachusetts came to end in 1843 with the founding of the Star of Bethlehem Lodge, in Chelsea. Four other Masonic lodges were later established in Chelsea, for a total of five, an extraordinary number for a town its size. Rev. Alger was still serving in the meeting house in 1843, when the Star of Bethlehem Lodge was founded, so he might have been a member. After he left the meeting house, in 1844, Alger served many years as chaplain of the Masonic lodge in South Natick, and one year he was the state-wide Grand Chaplain. In keeping with the Masonic tradition of secrecy, Alger’s membership in the Masons went unpublicized until his death, in 1881, when, according to the Natick Bulletin (11 Nov. 1881), .he was buried in South Natick with full Masonic rites and with the Masonic emblem carved on his gravestone.

The Masons had not only reconverted the meeting house to a Masonic temple, they had also been responsible for the design of the new Revere town hall, built in 1899. In “The Revere Town Hall: The Architecture of Americanism,” I tried to show that the design of the Revere town hall, fostered by the Masons, was intended to instill in the burgeoning immigrant population a pride in America and the Masonic Midnight Rider, whom Longfellow had made into a Prometheus, the fire-giver of American civilization (Forrey 1990).

X: The Meeting House as Counseling Center

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Meeting house during conversion to Counseling Center, c. 1985

By 1980, the meeting house was seldom used by the Seaview Lodge, which decided to sell the building. Several lawyers with offices in the neighborhood expressed an interest because they were rumored to want to raze the building and use the land as a parking lot. Patricia Moccia, an administrator at the Revere Community Counseling Center (RCCC), told me that the Masons preferred selling the building to someone who would respect its historical significance. Since the RCCC was looking for a new home, a lodge member alerted Moccia that the meeting house was on the market. The RCCC had started out in a garage in the back of St. Anthony’s Church, in Revere, but conditions in the garage were unsatisfactory. Psychiatry was not in the attic of the church but in the garage. The RCCC moved from St. Anthony’s to the basement of a small Methodist church, on Beach Street, not far from the meeting house. From the garage to the basement was a bit of an improvement, but the Methodists were concerned about the risks, and perhaps felt the stigma as well, of having mentally troubled people in their basement. When a new minister arrived, he told Moccia the RCCC would have to leave.

The RCCC wanted to buy the meeting house but could not raise the money. Then an angel, the kind that finance Broadway musicals, stepped in. He was a private investor who, around 1980, for tax purposes, purchased the meeting house from the Masons for $100,000. (This was the same building the Masons had bought from the Unitarians for $7,000 in 1919.) The angel agreed to lease the building to the RCCC, which undertook a major renovation. When the first phase of the renovation was completed, and the Counseling Center had moved in, I visited the meeting house on a cold March morning in 1985 to talk to Moccia in her first floor office. The doctor in charge of the Counseling Center in 1985, a controversial psychopharmacologist, was not on the premises. He was in hot water with state and federal agencies for “overprescribing”

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and for having an affair with a patient. Moccia told me the RCCC was “house poor,” and I told her a lack of money had been a chronic problem for the ministers of the meeting house for two hundred years, so the more things change, the more they stay the same. She spoke of wanting to have what was called a Las Vegas Night to raise money for the Center, but the city council had rejected her proposal, feeling too many organizations in the city were having Las Vegas Nights. The council did not want to kill the goose that was laying the golden eggs.

Gambling had not begun in Boston or Revere with the arrival of immigrants. Even as sober a judge and somber a Puritan as Samuel Sewall had a weakness for lotteries and wagering as well as an occasional cup of wine or brandy. For him, wagering and drinking did not deserve the same degree of moral disapproval that dancing, fornicating, and wearing wigs did. In having a moral blind spot, Sewall was not unique among Puritans. An entry in church records, during the pastorate of Payson Phillips, show an expenditure of 29 pounds for “Drink to incourage ye people to bid.” The bidding was to take place at an auction for pews, which included several new pews whose construction had been made possible by the removal of benches in the back that previously accommodated poorer, pewless females (Chamberlain 1908, 2: 302-303). So Puritans in the late eighteenth century, to raise money for the meeting house, had their version of a Las Vegas Night, which they called a “Vendoe” and for which they spent 29 pounds for alcohol to uninhibit bidders. The drinks presumably were on the house.

After talking to Moccia in her office on the first floor on that March morning, she gave me a tour of the three floors of the building. The ground floor had new wall-to-wall carpeting as well as handsome new $200 dollar chairs in the waiting room. She said one of the chairs had recently been stolen. There were small consultation rooms on the second floor on the Counseling Center, with small peek-through glass windows, which I thought of as the confessionals of the Age of Analysis, where patients were trying to save not their souls but their sanity. In the first half of the twentieth century, the magic cure was psychiatry, and especially psychoanalysis, the so-called “talking cure,” but in the second half of the century, with advances in chemistry, the magic cure was psychotropic drugs, which act on the mind. The talking cure had become supplemented and to some extent overshadowed by psychopharmacology, which is the study of the treatment of psychiatric disorders with drugs. Once seen as a miracle, drugs now, of course, are seen by some as the nation’s ruination.

Moccia told me something interesting in connection with the changing architecture of the meeting house. On those occasions when a patient became violent, when drugs or talking were not effective, that patient could be sraitjacketed, taken to the rear exit, put in an ambulance, and rushed to a hospital in Boston. The purpose was to spare other patients being exposed to psychotic behavior. A rear exit for psychotics reminded me of all those entrances in the original meeting house, which had separated the congregation on the basis of race and gender as the pews inside had separated them further on the basis of class. In the RCCC, the important distinction was not between the saved and the damned, as in Calvinist times, but between psychotics and what used to be called neurotics. As the town’s WASPS were replaced in the late nineteenth century by Irish and Italians, and in the late twentieth century by Spanish-speaking and South East Asian immigrants, mental illness had replaced sin as the great stigma. In 1985, most of the Counseling Center’s patients happened to be Italian-Americans, then the largest ethnic group in the city. An Italian-American herself, Moccia was aware of the prejudice against mental illness by her compatriots. If the Counseling Center had had a side door through which stigmatized patients could have entered unobserved, that might have made things easier for them, and their embarrassed relatives. But such a side door would have architecturally

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underscored the discrimination against them, as those entrances in the original meeting house had the discrimination against women and blacks.

In the 1980s, the city’s most recent immigrants, the Cambodians, had settled in a neighborhood near the beach, not far from the Counseling Center. It might as well have been in another country, because they did wanted nothing to do it with it. “They take care of their own,” Moccia explained, as earlier waves of immigrants had done. Mental illness was a shame each ethnic group, like each family, tried to deal with as best they could, which too often meant denying or hiding the problem by keeping the unfortunate family member in the attic, figuratively, if not literally.

In my 1985 visit, the cavernous top floor of the meeting house was still in the early stages of renovation.. “I want them to save that,” Moccia told me, looking up at the high ceiling, which probably dated from the 1887 renovation. It is unlikely anything remains of the 1710 meeting house except the huge oak frame, a part of which, on the third floor, I could see and put my hand on. The 1985 renovation was done by Michael Bartolo, Jr., a contractor with an office in East Boston, in Maverick Square. When I visited him, also in March 1985, he told me that the oak frame was as strong as ever. He gave me a copy of a letter, from Virginia Fitch, of the Massachusetts Historical Commission, dated June 15, 1983: “Pursuant to your recent request, I reiterate that the Massachusetts Historical Commission staff feel that the Revere Masonic Temple (First Church of Christ) appears eligible for individual listing on the National Register of Historic Places. Built in 1710, its significance lies in the fact that it is the earliest surviving frame church in Suffolk County and certainly one of the earliest in the Commonwealth. In addition, both the 1856 and 1887 renovations were important as stylish exponents of the design of their day. Despite alterations to the building, the survival of original framing timbers in the roof area and the retention of its basic 19th century form and massing constitute an important architectural unit.”

In June 2000, I had occasion to visit the Counseling Center again, on a sunny day when the building was being painted by a crew of Middle Easterners who were speaking a strange language as they worked, listening to exotic music, maybe from a tape player. Inside the building, the young woman behind the receptionist counter was a Southeast Asian, probably Cambodian. Most of the Southeast Asians in the reception area milled around, looking uneasy or puzzled, or just sat impassively. Signs on the wall were in English and what I presumed was Cambodian. Moccia’s observation fifteen years earlier that the Cambodians avoided the Counseling Center was obviously no longer the case. As Puritans had come to the meeting house early in the eighteenth century, seeking salvation, the Southeast Asians had come two hundred years later seeking counseling or medicine. In Puritan times, the minister was the medicine man; nearly three centuries later, the psychopharmacologist was.

The meeting house speaks of conflict and division, as well as of community and continuity, of free thinking as well as faith. If fire or lawyers looking for parking spaces do not destroy it, the oak frame may survive another three hundred years, serving as the backbone of public buildings whose architecture will change as needs and styles change. On its three hundredth birthday, the meeting house is not dead and mummified. It is alive and well. If the meeting house at no time has been beautiful, it has always been functional, a thing of everyday use. It has also been, for me at least, a revelation, for architecture may be the essence of history.

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Meeting House (Revere Community Counseling Center), 2008

Works Cited

Ahlstrom, S. 1973. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven: Yale.

Chamberlain, M. 1908. A Documentary History of Chelsea, 2 vols. Boston: Mass. Hist. Soc.

Chamberlain, M. 1886. “Winnisimmet, Rumney Marsh, Pullen Point and Chelsea.” The Memo-rial History of Boston, 4 vols. Boston: Osgood.

Corey, D. P. 1899. History of Malden. Malden: Corey.

Cummings, A. 1979. “Meeting and Dwelling House: Interrelationships in Early New England,” New England Meeting House and Church, 1620-1850. Boston: Boston U. 4-17

Cummings, A. 1983. “The Beginnings of Provincial Renaissance Architecture in Boston, 1690-1725.” Journal of Society of Architectural Historians, 42:1.

Donnelly, M. 1968. The New England Meeting Houses of the Seventeenth Century. Middletown: Wesleyan.

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Forrey, R. 1990. “The Architecture of Americanism.” Essex Institute Historical Collections 126: 148-170.

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