Originally intended to explore our town’s agricultural past and its barns, “while they’re still standing”, “Our Rural Heritage” has
branched into other areas of our history – country doctors and milk delivery during the pandemic, “swimming holes” in the summer, our one room schoolhouses in September and in December, the celebration of the “The Holidays”. We now intend to journey into the original villages which once comprised the town of Hampton, seven small communities with their own institutions and enterprises — schools, stores, mills, train stations, post offices – as well as the unique character of each area and the folks who lived there — Clarks Corner, Appaquag, Bigelow, Boston Hollow, Rawson, Howard Valley and Hampton Hill, which is where we will begin this series. And in consideration of its 300th anniversary on June 5th of this year, we’ll commence with its centerpiece : the Congregational Church.
The town center, also referred to, at one time or another, and sometimes still, as “town”, “Main Street”, “Windham Village”, “the village”, “Chelsea Hill, “Hampton Hill”, or simply, “the hill”, wasn’t established until after 1712. In Discovering Hampton, Janice Trecker explains that the proprietors of Windham determined that “the pleasant ridge-top situation and the fertile valley below would make a fine new settlement”, and named it “Windham Village”, though a 1713 reference calls it “Meeting House Hill”, which suggests that there were plans for a religious society prior to the petition for its establishment.
Within five years, sixteen of the inhabitants of the hill appealed to the General Assembly and the First Society of Windham to establish their own church. In 1717, their petition was granted, and “Canada Parish”, named for the first person to settle in what is now Hampton, became the “Second Religious Society of Windham”. The residents immediately started the arduous task of raising the money required for a minister and to construct a meeting house, and in 1722, William Billings, a Yale graduate, was hired as the first minister for a sum of 150 pounds and a salary of ninety pounds and free firewood. Billings was ordained on June 5, 1723 in the unfinished meeting house.
Susan Jewett Grigg’s Folklore and Firesides lists the members of the first church: Nathaniel Kingsbury, William Durkee, Ebenezer Abbey, George Martin, Joseph Jennings, Nathaniel Hovey, Samuel Ashley, John Clarke, John Durkee, William Durkee, Jeremiah Durkee, Thomas Marsh, William Farnham, John Scripture, Nathaniel Fline, Benjamin Bidlock. Within two years, over 30 more men would join the list, though everyone paid taxes to support the ministry, and the parishioners voted to “look upon every baptized person to be subject to church discipline and ought to be called to an account by some church or another, whenever they offend.”
Billings’ ministry was short-lived and plagued with dissension detailed in Jean Wierzbinski’s article, “Faithful Labours and Peculiar Trials” published in the Gazette, with restrictions such as this 1731 summons to a parishioner, “having been informed of your being over-taken with inebriating drink at sundry times of late, to great dishonor of Christ and religion and danger of your own soul”, and this criticism from a parishioner “I had rather hear my dog bark than Mr. Billings preach”. In these examples, the summons was ignored, and Billings refused to accept, or even hear, the man’s apology. Punishments were harsh in those days, branding for scandals such as adultery, jail for debtors, public floggings for countless offenses.
Billings died in 1733 ten years after his ordination, leaving four children and his wife, Bethiah, who would remarry the next minister, Samuel Moseley. A graduate of Harvard, and successful farmer, Moseley served as minister for the next fifty-eight years. As spiritual leader for almost six decades, Moseley saw his congregation through tumultuous times during the period of “The Great Awakening”, with the “Old Lights”, stalwart believers in the traditional role of the church and the minister, and the “New Lights”, who embraced the notion that the Spirit could speak through anyone, including marginalized people such as women and Native Americans. Wierzbinski rightly characterized the times as “a spiritual earthquake that caused deep and permanent schisms in the church”.
On a local level, Moseley also dealt with disputes over pews. With the building of the new meetinghouse came the assignment of seats, a task charged to a committee. Apparently, the committee made the mistake of permitting men of small means to own prime pews, allowing “men of little or no estate to sit in the forward and high pews; while others of good estate and high in public esteem were compelled with shame to take the lower seats”. This infuriated the elite, as ownership of pews was proof of societal status. It was then decided to “sell the pews at public vendue”, and twenty-five pews sold for prices ranging from three to fourteen pounds. This decision also proved problematic, as some bidders were bachelors who weren’t heavily taxed, and others weren’t eligible voters, narrowly defined as white, male, land owners of “sober conversation and quiet, peaceable behavior”. These sales, too, were rescinded, and a new committee was charged with assigning the seats in accordance with “the requisite order and formality”. This, apparently, resolved the issues.
Moseley died in 1791 at the age of 83, and is buried in the North Cemetery, where the Reverend James Cogswell delivered the sermon : “God has in his wisdom and kindness, after a long life of faithful labours, eminent usefulness, peculiar trials, and excruciating sufferings, put a period to the life of his aged servant, the pastor of this flock”.
Though the “pillars” of the church reference its parishioners, what remains familiar to us from the church’s past are the pillars themselves, the facility itself, the history of which Bob Burgoyne chronicled in the Gazette series “This Old Hill”. Although the original meeting house was replaced, its impact on the village was lasting. With early farms situated to the north and west prior to its construction, this section of town became its center once the meeting house was built. However, little else is known of the first structure. “It is not clear exactly where it was sited, or whether the structure was ever fully completed. It most likely was built on the west side of the street on or near the site of the present meeting house,” Burgoyne wrote. “This first structure served the society for only twenty years before it was proposed that a new meeting house be built.” Jonathan Clark recorded in his journal that the original meeting house was moved across the street to serve, ironically, “spirits” for seventy years as a tavern for townspeople and travelers alike.
In 1753, George Martin deeded a parcel of his Main Street frontage, for the sum of forty pounds, “right west of the meeting house to build a new meetinghouse for divine worship”. Designed and built by Thomas Steadman, Jr., who built several other of the village structures, the new building “was most probably a simple rectangular structure with a nine window front and central entry,” Burgoyne wrote. “In most respects this second period meeting house would have looked like a standard two –story colonial house without the chimney (early meeting houses were not heated). “ As Griggs observed, the worshippers prized their meetinghouses too dearly to risk fires, and believed the “red hot preaching should be enough to keep them warm.”
“To say that the structure was simple is not to say that it was plain,” Burgoyne notes. In “Early Connecticut Meetinghouses”, Frederick Kelly describes the paint on the 1805 church: “on the roof and the backside red, the foreside and the ends a stone yellow, the window frames white, and the doors and bottom boards a chocolate color”. The steeple was put on in 1790, would be toppled in the hurricane of 1815 and 1938 and returned to the roof. In 1798, Jonathan Clark installed the first bell, which Griggs relays “was ordered rung at 9 o’clock at night, at noon, and at 8 ‘clock Saturday.” One hundred years later Arthur Kimball would recall in Alison Davis’ Hampton Remembers, “At weddings it rang joyfully and at funerals it tolled, one stroke for a male, two strokes for a female, and one stroke for each year of the person’s ’life. Then if you heard it and you knew who was sick in town you could tell pretty well who had died.” The bell also served town functions, summoning residents to attend meetings and to fight fires.
In 1838-1839, repairs to the church included the Greek Revival remodeling of the façade and the addition of the columned portico. Kelly describes “The angles of the building are now treated with plain Greek Doric Pilasters. The four columns of the…front portico are of the same order but fluted. Pilasters and columns carry a heavy, but simple, entablature, composed of a molded architrave, a plain frieze, and a molded cornice. This entablature extends along both sides and across the front of the building where the projected gable forms a pediment…the soffit of this portico is finished with raised paneling…once part of the pews.” Electricity was installed in 1922.
The first parsonage, which still stands at the top of Hammond Hill facing the Main Street, is historically known as the Moseley place for the minister. The second parsonage, the colonial on Parsonage Road, hence the name, still stands as well. In 1917, the Church purchased real estate across the street for the present parsonage. In 1902, a chapel was built because parishioners felt it was too cold in the church winters. Built on the same site, Holt Hall would eventually replace the chapel, which served multiple purposes: for religious meetings, social gatherings, sewing circles, and as a cooperative kindergarten starting in 1950 into the early sixties, when the horse stables south of the church were also removed. Swings suspended from the stable arches replaced the horses, and some of us remember swinging on them during kindergarten recess, or while our parents socialized after church.
The Church also sponsored several organizations, various couples clubs and youth groups, and most notably, the Ladies Aid Society. In Hampton Remembers, Helen Mathews relayed “the Ladies Aid Society built the chapel, not with their own hands but with their own money,” and Gertrude Pearl recalled, “We put on a supper every single Saturday night until some of us wished we never had to eat again.” In The History of the Ladies’ Aid Society, Eleanor Sharpe recorded: “In the six years between 1904 and 1910 we purchased one thousand eight hundred and fifty-two yards of cloth which was made into various kinds of salable articles,” and Harriet Utley Brown in Memories of Hampton noted that a future antiquarian might “unearth the fact that the principal industries of Hampton during the early part of the Twentieth Century were the manufacture of rag rugs, aprons, bayberry, ironing pads and grandmother pen-wipers by the Ladies’ Aid Society.”
Much has changed in the last 300 years. The Church is no longer the spiritual and social center of the town, as it was for so many years, with the arrival of folks of many faiths and new community organizations. What it retains is its distinction as the second oldest meetinghouse in Connecticut in continuous use on its original site, and its aesthetic presence at the center of the town. What remains is the sense of history. To step into the church, for a service or a concert, to sit in those controversial pews, or in the balcony, listening to the historic pipe organ, in the dim light of candlelit windows and chandeliers, is to step into Hampton’s past.
Dayna McDermott