The official history of the church, written by Dr. H. C. Hovey, gives interesting facts concerning the heating of the old building:
"For seventy years those who crowded this church depended on footstoves altogether for warmth in winter; while the minister preached in his ample cloak, and wore gloves with a finger and thumb cut off to enable him the better to turn the leaves. A law was made allowing the sexton twenty cents for each footstove that he had to fill before service and remove afterward. A great sensation was made in 1819 by the introduction of wood stoves at an outlay of $100. The first day they were in place the people were so overcome that some of them fainted away and were carried out of the house; but they revived on learning that as yet no fire had been kindled in the new stoves. The doors of the stoves opened into the ample vestibule, where the custom continued of ranging the many footstoves in a wide circle to be filled with live coals from the stove."
On the Sunday after the battle of Lexington Dr. Jonathan Parsons made an appeal in the name of liberty. After this Captain Ezra Lunt stepped into the aisle and formed a company of sixty men, which is said to have been the first company of volunteers to join the Continental Army.
Later Newburyport supplied a number of companies. But the call came for still another company. "Day after day the recruiting officers toiled in vain," Dr. Hovey writes, "Finally the regiment was invited to the Presbyterian church, where they were addressed in such spirited and stirring words that once again a number of this church stepped forth to take the covenant, and in two hours after the benediction had been spoken the entire company was raised."
During the war twenty-two vessels and one thousand men, from the towns of Newbury and Newburyport, were lost at sea. The first American flag seen in British waters, after the cessation of hostilities, was displayed in the Thames by Nicholas Johnson of Newburyport, captain of the Compte de Grasse.
Among the treasures of the church is the Bible which Whitefield used. The evangelist, who died Sunday, September 30, 1770, is buried in the crypt under the pulpit where he had planned to preach on the very day of his death, as he had preached many times during the years since the building of the church. To this dark crypt thousands of reverent visitors have groped their way. One, less reverent, removed an arm of the skeleton and carried it to England as a relic. No one knew what had become of it until, after the death of the thief, it was returned to Newburyport, together with a bust of Whitefield. This bust is also one of the treasures of Old South.
Those who love this old church at Newburyport delight in the lines of John Greenleaf Whittier:
"Under the church of Federal Street,
Under the tread of its Sabbath feet,
Walled about by its basement stones,