Not long after landing at Plymouth the Puritans built a fort, which was used as a Lord's Day meeting-place till a meeting-house was built in 1648. As other settlements were made, religious services were at first held in tents or under trees and where a settler had a roomy house this often was used. The first meeting-house at Boston had mud walls, a thatched roof, and earthen floor, which was used till 1640.
The first meeting-houses in New England were square and made of logs with the spaces between the logs filled with clay and with steep roofs which were thatched with reeds and long grass and with a beaten earth for a floor. These buildings were often quite small, one having been thirty-six feet long, twenty feet wide, and twelve feet high, and another was but twenty-six feet long and twenty feet wide. Later these were replaced by larger and better buildings and these early rude structures were used for granaries and storehouses.
The second form of meeting-houses was a square wooden building having a truncated pyramidal roof with a belfry or turret. One of this type, built at Hingham in 1681, known as the "Old Ship," is still in existence. The largest and finest of this second type was the First Church at Boston, a large square brick building, built in 1713, and which was used till 1808.
The third type of New England colonial meeting-houses had a lofty wooden steeple at one end, of which the old South Church at Boston, a well-known historic building, is a good example.
In the South the churches were often placed by the waterside and people came to them over the water in various kinds of vessels. In New England the first meeting-houses were often built in the valleys, or the meadow-lands and the houses of the settlers were built about them. As the population increased there could no longer be land available for all in the valleys and the houses were built out near watering places and pasturage for convenience and so the meeting-houses began to be placed on hill-tops. This was done so as to be a lookout for danger from Indians and also so it could be seen from all parts of the country as the people had to journey through narrow roads and bridle-paths obscured by trees and brush. Too, there was a pride in such a location, to show off a fine meeting-house, which would thus be visible for many miles around.
The old New England meeting-houses were used for various purposes, one of the strangest being for the nailing of the heads of wolves to the logs on the outside. Wolves were so numerous and so destructive and so feared that rewards were paid for their killing and to show this the heads were nailed to the outer walls of the meeting-house. This was all the decoration that the outer walls of the building had for near a century as during the seventeenth century it was considered vain and extravagant to paint them but by the middle of the eighteenth century paint became cheaper and more plentiful and the meeting-houses began not only to be painted but also in conspicuous colors and towns began to vie with one another in the most striking displays. One new meeting-house was painted a bright yellow and soon others were likewise adorned. "Brooklyn church, then, in 1762, ordered that the outside of its meeting-house be 'culered' in the approved fashion. The body of the house was painted a bright orange; the doors and 'bottom boards' a warm chocolate color; the 'window-jets,' corner-boards, and weather-boards white. What a bright nosegay of color! As a crowning glory Brooklyn people put up an 'Eleclarick Rod' on the gorgeous edifice, and proudly boasted that Brooklyn meeting-house was the 'newest, biggest and yallowest' in the county."[374]
There was no shade about the early meeting-houses in New England as the trees were cut down around it for fear of forest fires. There were no curtains nor window-blinds, so that the heat and blazing light in summer would make it bad for all in the church. They did often have heavy outside shutters but they could not be closed during services as the room would then be made too dark for the minister to see to read his sermon. Later the forests grew again and they were not cut away nor cleared up and the meeting-house would thus become dark and gloomy. Oiled paper was used in the windows of these early meeting-houses and later when glass came into use it was nailed in instead of being puttied.
The early meeting-house of the Puritans in New England were of a very simple interior with raftered walls and sanded puncheon floors or earthen floors. The early Dutch churches in New Netherlands also were plain and they were kept in the greatest cleanliness, scrubbed often and floors sanded with fine beach-sand. The churches of the Southern colonies were usually better furnished and flowers were used for decorations, which was never the case with the Puritans. The pulpits in all the churches were rather pretentious affairs, being elevated above the floor, enclosed, with a narrow flight of stairs leading up to them. At least in the early Puritan churches there was a sounding-board placed above the pulpit, which was a board supported from the roof by a slender iron rod.
In the earliest meeting-houses in New England the seats were made of rough hand-riven boards placed on legs and without backs. Later there were pews with narrow seats around the sides and high partition walls between. In the early Dutch churches the men had places in pews around the walls while chairs were placed in the center of the church for the women to occupy. In some of the Virginia churches the seats were comfortably cushioned. In later times in all the churches the pews were carefully assigned and persons who crowded into pews above their station were unceremoniously put out by those in charge.
The meeting-houses in New England were wholly without means of heating until the middle of the eighteenth century. Throughout the long and tedious services during the coldest weather of a bitter climate, attendants at the meetings had to get along as best they could. The men wore their heaviest clothing during the services. The minister, too, would keep himself wrapped up while in the pulpit just as on his way to the meeting-house. The women in the earlier times dressed to suit the temperature, but as wealth came fashion also entered in and thin silk hose, cloth or kid or silk slippers, linen underclothing, dresses with elbow sleeves and round low necks, and a thin cloth cape or mantle for the shoulders was too often in midwinter the Sunday apparel. The women did protect their heads with caps and mufflers and veils and their hands with gloves and muffs.