May 1, 2022
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places* in 1976, First Parish Church on North Street is of course a familiar Medfield landmark. It is the third building erected on the site by colonists who settled on what was the ancestral land of the Wampanoags. The first was put up in 1652; the second in 1706, and the present building in 1789.
The front of the meetinghouse building originally faced North Street until 1839, when it was rotated 90 degrees to face Main Street. It was then raised about six feet to accommodate the Greek Revival “temple-front” design, complete with wide stairs, portico, columns, and cornice – an expensive renovation. The Greek Revival style was a popular expression of the democratic ideal that was coming to fruition in the first half-century of the new nation.
(Another factor contributing to raising the church six feet may have been the prospect of renting part of the newly-created basement; in that era some other New England churches did so to help make up for government support lost as the wall between church and state stiffened in the early 19th century.)
In those days, selling pews was a common way to help finance a church. At the historical society is a deed showing that in 1839 Nathan Wight paid $66 ($2,000 in today’s money) for pew #44, which became the property of him and his heirs. First Parish church records (not at the historical society) include other pew deeds, transfers of pew ownership back to the church, and pew taxes paid as late as the 1950s.
However, pew ownership and taxes were eliminated in the new Articles of Government adopted May 11, 1960, when the Unitarian and Universalist churches merged.
In 2022, with church membership and attendance on the decline nationwide…a mobile population…and an egalitarian approach to church seating…selling pews (reserved only for their owner’s use) seems like a bizarre obstacle put in the way of someone who wishes to attend the service.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about the practice that developed after the Protestant Reformation:
Churches were not commonly furnished with permanent pews before the Protestant Reformation.[2] The rise of the sermon as a central act of Christian worship, especially in Protestantism, made the pew a standard item of church furniture.[3] Hence the use or avoidance of pews could be used as a test of the high or low character of a Protestant church: describing a mid-19th century conflict between Henry Edward Manning and Archdeacon Hare, Lytton Strachey remarks with characteristic irony, “Manning had been removing the high pews from the church in Brighton, and putting in open benches in their place. Everyone knew what that meant; everyone knew that the high pew was one of the bulwarks of Protestantism, and that an open bench had upon it the taint of Rome”.[4]
In some churches, pews were installed at the expense of the congregants, and were their personal property; there was no general public seating in the church itself. In these churches, pew deeds recorded title to the pews, and were used to convey them. Pews were originally purchased from the church by their owners under this system, and the purchase price of the pews went to the costs of building the church.
Certain areas of the church were considered to be more desirable than others, as they might offer a better view of services or, indeed, might make a certain family or person more prominent or visible to their neighbors during these services.
During the late medieval and early modern period, attendance at church was legally compulsory, so the allocation of a church’s pews offered a public visualisation of the social hierarchy within the whole parish. At this time many pews had been handed down through families from one generation to the next.
The deeded pews of the Medfield meetinghouse in the 1800s were box pews. These high-walled seating areas enabled families to gather protected from drafts by the box-pew wall panels. It is not known whether the common practice of bringing a container of hot coals to place in the center of the pew or a dog to warm one’s feet was a feature of Sunday services at the meetinghouse.
In the late 1800s or early 1900s, the box pews were removed and replaced by the more familiar rows of open seating in fixed pews. The panels of the box pews were re-purposed as the wainscoting in the first-floor space of the meetinghouse.
*About the National Register of Historic Places
The National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places contains close to 100,000 listings across the country. There are prescribed steps an applicant must go through to get the designation. Being listed in it is largely honorific; however, getting listed is the first step toward becoming eligible for federal tax credits related to preserving historic buildings.
If your property is listed in the NRHP, you are under no obligation to preserve it or improve it or even maintain it. In fact, you are free to demolish it, provided you are in compliance with other state or local regulations.
For more information, click here.