SOME OLD MEETING HOUSES
Perhaps no single work of man enhances the beauty of a Cape village so much as the sparkling white churches whose spires point unerringly toward the blue heavens and serve as landmarks to Cape Codders at sea and ashore. One can find them conspicuously at the center of each of the old villages, and, indeed, it was from their presence that the villages grew. For the early Meeting Houses were not only centers of worship but of government and of all community activity. Distances between villages were computed as between Meeting Houses and until very recently there were many road signs directing travellers to one or another of them, a testimony to the importance of the church to the life of the town.
The early colonists of the Cape were a plain but very pious people and in view of the hardships they endured in the building of a new land it was little wonder that they turned to their God for help, and in Thanksgiving for His bounty in the new surroundings. In many cases they built their churches before they had built their homes and they used them. Someone who visited the Cape remarked that “there are too many churches for any of them to prosper”, but, at one time or another each of them was filled to the rafters. The settlers came to church out of choice and necessity and as the land prospered the farmers and the tradesmen and the Captains came in humility and thanksgiving, giving generously to the support of the beautiful, white edifices that were the symbol of their devotion to Christianity. They have survived waves of free thought, of come-outers, Quakers, and bad times and good and they still stand, a monument sculptured in wood to man’s best dreams, their plain, dignified and honest lines a living testimony to the character of the Cape men who built them. Thankfully, after the custom ofthe forefathers, Cape people still gather at the churches on Sunday and there are none here that stand empty and abandoned.
In the early times on the Cape the activities of the whole week were directed toward the Sabbath, and its observance took much longer than the hour or two now devoted to it. Sunday in all the villages really commenced on Saturday night when the diversions and duties of a workaday week were finally and quite definitely put aside. On Saturday afternoons Cape kitchens were warm and fragrant with the aroma of a week’s baking, part of which would first be savoured at Saturday night supper when the succulent baked beans and brown bread would make its traditional appearance on the kitchen table. And Sunday breakfast was almost as traditional with the warmed-over beans frequently accompanied by fish cakes of local cod which had been taken from a cool Cape cellar or buttery where it had been put down in native salt. Breakfast done, Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes came out from their week’s retirement, usually to the utter distress of the younger members of the household who, from the stiff postures and unhappy looks and squirmings could have been in fetters, rather than in starched-bosom shirts, black store clothes, and—most repulsive of all—highly polished, imprisoning boots. So restrained did the young feel without the casual freedom of their weekday clothes that they would have had neither taste nor heart for play, even had it been allowed. So they sat stiffly with the other members of the family, as if awaiting the judgment, until, at quarter to eleven, the commanding tones of the great church bell were heard. Then the great movement commenced along the narrow, twisting lanes, with each house emptying its very sedate and formal members into the streets which led to their common destination, the Meeting House. There they would find their more distant neighbors assembling outside with the horses and wagons that brought them secured in the rambling sheds nearby and within sound of the fine old hymnsthat would soon be rolling out through the opened windows.
The motorist of today on Cape Cod will, in time, begin to look for familiar landmarks. A white spire soaring above the pines indicates the presence of a village and each has identifying characteristics of its own. To the traveller coming home to the Cape there is no other landmark as welcome a sight as the old, gilded weather cock which perches above the West Parish Meeting House at West Barnstable. When, from the new Mid-Cape Highway, you first catch sight of this grand bird shining, golden and bright and triumphant above the trees you know that you are really on the Cape and that an old friend is keeping the same watchful eye over land and sea of today as in the days of the American Revolution and before. For the weather-cock crowns the steeple of the oldest Congregational church building in all America. It is a beautiful structure which served the Town of Barnstable as Meeting House during the most fateful days of American history and, through the foresight of some Cape Codders, it is now being restored to its full, and original magnificence. Already the exterior of the church has been restored until it is now the very same one that was familiar to Commodore John Percival, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, James Otis, and a host of other great men and women of the County in the days when greatness seemed to touch all those within sight of the dunes and the salt marshes of Barnstable. The site for the Meeting House could not have been better chosen and today, more than ever, the old church, on a slight elevation where tree-lined Cape roads meet, is an edifice of great beauty and dignity, commanding attention.
As beautiful as the newly-restored church appears from the outside, it is, nevertheless, the unfinished interior that proves the wisdom of the restoration program. Looking upwards at the dome of the Meeting House with its tremendous beams and unique bowed rafters is an awesome experience. Standing there it is impossible not to feel in touch with the historic past, with the very beginnings of America. And youmarvel at the artistry and ingeniousness of the builders who carved these huge timbers from local forests, who weighted them down for a full year to achieve the desired bow shape, who built a framework which is as staunch and true today as ever it was, and that has stubbornly resisted the encroachments of passing fashions. The workers who are in charge of the restoration have been touched with the magic of the place. They speak with great respect of those long-ago builders of the Cape and they point with enthusiasm to the many ways in which the historic structure is coming back to life.
Just down the road a piece, and toward the great marshes and the picturesque dunes that stretch out towards Sandy Neck, the King’s Highway continues its rambling way from West Barnstable down Cape. It is a street of green lawns and historic houses, of flowering shrubs and well-kept gardens that flourish in the good, black earth of the North Side. There is so much to see there that even the most observing may pass by, unseeing, the peaceful, old, white church at the corner of Rendezvous Lane at Barnstable. Amid the shadows from ancient trees the church dreams serenely in the summer sunlight and it is difficult to imagine that this is the very spot where, in the year 1774, there took place one of the most unusual and daring blows for liberty in all our history.
The Third Baptist Church of Barnstable was formed in 1842, after it had purchased, for $77.00, the second Barnstable Court House which had been built in 1774. The old, wooden building had been abandoned by the County upon the erection of the new granite Court House and the Baptists found it well suited to their needs. The building was turned around from the Highway to face Rendezvous Lane and some alterations were made to make it more suitable for a Meeting House. Today, a bronze tablet within the church proclaims that “this building was the Court House where the Kings Court was forced to end its sessions by a band of patriots in September 1774.”
The march of a “Body of the People” to Barnstable on September 27, 1774 took place as the result of an Act of Parliament which, in those hectic days, seemed to be enacting everything possible to alienate its colonials. The new act proclaimed that jurors, heretofore drawn by the selectmen, should now be chosen by the Crown’s own representative, the Sheriff. Under such a system it was obvious that the Crown would control the whole local system of justice, and those who came before the courts, and were known to be unsympathetic with the Crown, would receive very short shrift. The patriots decided that, to effectively show protest to such an act, they must close the lower courts, in order that no appeals would reach the “packed”, higher courts. To carry out this purpose a large body of men assembled at Sandwich on the night of September 26, 1774. There they planned for the morrow what must have been the Cape’s first picket line.
On the morning of September 27, the newly-formed Body of the People moved towards the old Court House at Barnstable. They were afoot and on horseback, with the horsemen in the lead, and through every village they passed their number was swelled. When they passed the home of Chief Justice Otis they respectfully raised their hats in salute and preceded him to the Court where, 1500 strong, they awaited the opening of Court. The air at Rendezvous Lane must have been charged with suspense and expectancy when, at last, the Chief Justice and his aides, led by the Sheriff, complete with drawn sword and staff of office, approached the unprecedented group who blocked their passage to the Court House door. Justice Otis, upon ascertaining the business of the group, ordered them to disperse. Through their leader, Nathaniel Freeman of Sandwich, they replied, “We thank your honor for having done your duty; we shall continue to perform ours.” And continue they did, until the Justice left the scene and it was established that there would be no session. Before the day was over the patriot band hadfurthermore obtained written agreement from the Justices that they would not carry out the objectionable Act of Parliament that had inspired the march.
If the Body of the People became the Cape’s first picket line, it was also the most orderly one anywhere at any time. In their preparations for the march on Barnstable they had ruled against the use of profanity and alcohol. They were well-disciplined, and entirely under the control of their democratically-chosen leaders. The group at Rendezvous Lane on the September morning was no “rabble in arms”; it consisted of some of the truly great men of the Colony, making an effective, but respectful, protest against an injustice which threatened the freedoms for which they had crossed the broad Atlantic. It was like the men of the Cape to settle their own problems in their own way. Two years later the Colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence. Cape Codders had chosen their way at the little white church in Barnstable.
From the window of my old house at West Dennis I look out over the blue Cove of Bass River to where the white Captain’s Church rises on the hill at South Dennis. It is bright and peaceful and meaningful. In summer it is framed by the lacy branches of elm trees on the near shore; in winter it is a beacon of light in a gray landscape. I have watched the purple shadows of night slide softly from its sides in the spring sunrise; and I have watched an autumn sunset gild its steeple with burnished gold. It is good to have it there, where it has stood and looked across the Cove for over a century.
It was felt that Dennis had come of age when, in 1795, the Southside of town were granted a Meeting House of their own, to be erected at South Dennis. At first the new Meeting House was supplied by ministers from other churches but by 1817 the Reverend John Sanford was called as its own pastor to administer to a church membership of twenty-nine persons. Eighteen years later the church had becometoo small to accommodate the growing parish. Then, too, there was already stirring within men the inspirations of a country come of age, when the hurried, rather crude buildings of another era must be replaced by an architecture that was more expressively American. So, in 1835, it was decided to tear down the old edifice and build a fine, new church on the same site. It was hoped that the auctioning off of the pews, combined with the voluntary labor of men of the village, would be enough to get the building started, at least. Fortunately for all of us there was also the matter of the beans.
The men of the parish met on a bitter, cold day in January to consider ways and means of financing the new church. It was the kind of day to discourage any kind of action, and the offers of financial help were desultory and infrequent. Thoroughly discouraged, one of their number slipped out of the meeting and returned to the warmth of his own fireside to think the matter over. Finally, he had an inspiration and, calling his wife he asked her if she could provide dinner for as many as were attending the meeting. “For,” he said, “if those men go home for dinner they will never come back and that will be an end to it.” Upon hearing the problem the good wife set to work. Luckily, the weeks baking was almost intact in the buttery, and, by the standards of the Cape in 1835, it was not at all unusual that there were twenty-five pies stored there. But that was not all—there was Indian Pudding, and baked beans galore, yearning for the company of the huge loaves of brown bread that soon came steaming from the oven. All that was needed to complete, a dinner, the very smell of which might fill any man with a sense of well-being—and generosity—was coffee. And soon she had made coffee, scalding hot, and brimming over from the biggest container in her house. In no time at all the full dinner had been delivered to the meeting where its effect was such that the men of the parish took on a whole new lease on life and began to outbid one another in generosity.The huge sum of $6000 was raised, enough to build the new church, and some of the men became so enthusiastic that they could not wait to get to the bank to withdraw their money.
So the white church was built, there upon the hill, and it was not then very different from the building a visitor would enter today. The same tower clock, and the same auditorium clock would, when not seized by the temporary fits of temperament that are the privilege of age, be telling the same old time, while the same chandelier with its lovely etched globes would be sending forth the same warm glow over the white walls and straight-posture-demanding pew. And the light would glint as ever from the sides of old silver, the original Communion Set. Now, from the front of the church, instead of from a balcony as before, would come the strains of organ music from an instrument that has been doing its Sunday duty for nearly one hundred years at the same church, and had done duty elsewhere for a hundred years before that. This is very likely the oldest organ still in regular use in America, and it is not just by coincidence that it is frequently used to play hymns which have in them the fresh, salted breath of the sea. Tablets offer long lists of names of the South Dennis Captains who were members of the church. Now, as then, among the congregation to whom “He gives the keeping of the lights along the shore”, there are Nickersons and Thachers and Crowells and Bakers and Kelleys, and there are newer faces and newer names. Many have followed the advice of their first pastor to “read and understand the history of your pious forefathers, than whom no people under heaven are entitled to higher honors.” And all have helped, and gladly, to keep this splendid symbol of the forefathers faith a living and a meaningful one. So it is too all across the Cape and up and down it, wherever a white church looms by a village street, and its noble spire points to the blue heavens.