PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL, PHILADELPHIA.
BLACK HORSE INN YARD, PHILADELPHIA.
BRUTON PARISH CHURCH, WILLIAMSBURG, VA. 1714.
CHAPTER XII
CHURCHES OF THE COLONIAL PERIOD
IT is a far cry from the first place of worship contrived at Jamestown, in 1607, to the stately fanes erected in the eighteenth century in all the Colonies. Through each successive stage of development, however, runs a thread of continuity corresponding to the material circumstances of the colonists. Everywhere in the Colonies, the church building was an exceedingly important structure and no one building or set of buildings, in each community, more faithfully reflected the social and political as well as the religious conditions of the colonists. Setting aside the civic and defensive uses to which church edifices were often put, especially in the earliest period, and confining ourselves to the purely ecclesiastical side of their existence, we shall find them an invaluable index to the varied aspects of the life of the times.