“The ABCs of Newtown” is a series tying each letter of the alphabet to something in Newtown. This week we continue with a look at the historic landmark at 31 Main Street.

Colonial meeting houses were the central focus of every New England town, often the largest building in town at the time of their construction. They were simple buildings without statues, decorations, stained glass, or even crosses. Often built using tax money, the Colonial era meeting house was the focal point of the community, where residents would discuss local issues, conduct religious services, and engage in town business.

Don Studley, president of The Historic Preservation Trust (HPT), calls Newtown Meeting House “an iconic New England landmark.”

HPT is a not-for-profit organization that oversees and maintains the historic building at 31 Main Street. Its mission, Studley recently told The Newtown Bee, “is to preserve the meeting house because that was the original seat of town government. Before the separation of church and state, it basically was the place where all the town meetings were held, where the town government transpired.”

The Trust was formed in 1988, after Newtown Congregational Church sold the building to the Town of Newtown for $1. “The Trust assumed all of the costs for operating the building,” he explained.

Around the same time, fundraising began to renovate the already historic building. Meeting House Administrator Sherry Paisley laughed while talking with The Bee recently about the morning the keys were handed over from the Town to the HPT representatives.

“When the officials of the Trust arrived that morning to take over the ownership of the building,” she said, “they opened the front door and water rushed out. Pipes had frozen and burst the previous night.”

Within two years, however, the major restorations earned the Trust a 1991 Award of Merit from the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation.

“We always find something interesting, whether during renovations or maintenance,” Paisley shared. “When we first started the renovations all those years ago, we got into the restroom part, and we found what must have been a 6 by 6 post. It was irregular — it had been hatcheted out by a hatcher, and the last person to work in that area had put in his initials. He used a nail to get into the wood, and the date was 1914.

“I just love finding stuff like that,” she added. “All these things that we find are just fascinating. And to think that the building was built by hand, and has been maintained all these years, and an awful lot of the heavy woodworking is original, and still holding the building up. It’s the greatest building.”

The First Meeting House

The original Newtown Meeting House was built in 1720, near the current location of the Main Street flagpole.

Worship services and other events were conducted in private homes following the formation of the Ecclesiastical Society of Newtown (later Newtown Congregational Church) and the incorporation of Newtown in 1711. By November 1718, Thomas Skidmore offered to build a proper meeting house in the young town.

Skidmore proposed a meeting house measuring 50 feet long and 36 feet wide for the sum of 45 pounds sterling (or just over $11,300 today, according to a University of Wyoming currency converter). During a meeting on January 18, 1719, attendees voted to place it in the intersection of Town Street (now Main Street) and Upper Cross Highway (West Street and Church Hill Road).

Among his works for Newtown Historical Society, the late Town Historian Dan Cruson in June 1990 published “The Old Meeting House.” Within that essay he noted that in the much slower days of horse and wagon, “such placement of a prominent structure was not at all uncommon. It was placed on a site which was town property and it clearly dominated the village, in the same way as the flag pole does today.”

Skidmore’s offer was accepted, the building constructed, and it was in continuous use by summer 1720. The meeting house was used for town business during the week, religious services all day Sunday, and a prayer meeting one night each week.

The 18th Century gilded rooster weather vane that continues to roost atop the meeting house was an early part of the building, although Cruson notes regrettably in his essay that “research has repeatedly failed to reveal when the weather vane was built or by whom.”

Ezra Johnson, Newtown’s first unofficial town historian, shared similar disappointment in his History of Newtown, Conn.

“The writer regrets exceedingly that he finds nothing on record of the history of the ‘weather vane.’ That it was on the steeple at the time of the Revolutionary war is well known,” he wrote.

Johnson did have a great personal story about the weather vane, however. He wrote of being a “little boy” and accompanying his father to Bridgeport to have the rooster regilded.

“I had the honor of riding to the city with it. It was nearly as high as I and its long spurs, its high comb, and the dents the bullets had made on its body were all part of a history lesson which I have never forgotten,” he wrote.

He also recalled being told as a child that “a catch story” of his childhood featured the weather vane and a Main Street neighbor. Children were told, he said, “that whenever the old rooster on the early Presbyterian meeting house steeple heard Judge Blackman call his hens to feed them he always flew down and ate with them.”

The weather vane served as inspiration for the official Town of Newtown seal and town symbol.

Sparse Furnishings, Slow Work

To say the building was sparsely furnished upon construction feels like an understatement. Johnson noted that at the time of the resignation of Rev Thomas Toucey in 1724, one pew had been constructed for Toucey and his family.

When Toucey’s successor, Rev Elisha Kent, arrived, a pew was built for his family.

“With these exceptions there were nothing but wide benches for seats and no other furnishings save an open fire place where they could roll on logs for bodily comfort,” wrote Johnson. Additional seating did not arrive until April 1735, when a vote approved the Presbyterian society “as soon as may be” possible to install six new pews, three on either side of the pulpit.

The society voted in the spring of 1746 to add a “bellfree” to the building, Johnson wrote. The steeple was not added until 1752, however, when a committee of five men was appointed to construct that on the east end of the meeting house.

That work was not completed until November 1763. Until that time, Stephen Parmelee beat the drum to summon residents to religious meetings, town meetings, and public gatherings. Upon the installation of the church bell, Society Clerk Abel Botsford was hired to be bell ringer. For the “year ensuing,” according to Johnson, Botsford “shall ring ye bell on ye Sabbath and on all other public times and at 9 o’clock at night.” He was paid 40 shillings a year.

In 1769 it was voted that the meeting house bell would also ring at “all seasons needful, at deaths and funerals, and other occasions of lectures and religious meetings of a religious nature.” Botsford was still the bell ringer and he was paid three pounds annually out of the town treasury.

Newtown had a population at that time of 350 families, again according to Johnson.

Meeting House On The Move

By the 1790s, the growth of the Episcopal Church in Newtown had outpaced its Congregational cousins. When it came time for the Episcopalians to construct their third church building, “a prominent site at the top of the hill, in the middle of today’s Church Hill Road, was chosen,” Cruson wrote.

Newtown’s town house was already in the lot being considered by the Episcopal church, however.

Newtown Meeting House was also in the lot to the immediate north. The building was “directly in the way of the proposed front door of the church,” Cruson pointed out in his essay.

“Therefore a deal was struck whereby the Episcopalians would relocate the town house and then move the meeting house eight rods to the west, putting it in the middle of West Street directly across Main Street from the Church,” he wrote.

On June 13, 1792, a group of men raised the building onto logs and, aided by horses, rolled the building 44 yards to the west, to its present location in the middle of West Street.

Following site preparations, the move itself took 90 minutes. The event was so momentous it was covered by The Connecticut Journal, a newspaper out of New Haven that noted the move was “the greatest movement ever attempted in this part of the state.”

Cruson believed Newtown’s meeting house, in its current location, was the only one in the state, and possibly New England, “which is sitting in an original Colonial site position, in the middle of the street.”

A New Building

By the early 19th Century the meeting house was again in bad shape. On behalf of the Ecclesiastical Society, William Edmond (for whom Edmond Town Hall was named) applied to the General Assembly for permission to hold a lottery to raise $5,000 for the construction of a new building. The Assembly approved a $3,000 lottery.

By 1808 the society voted to build its new meeting house. The contract for the new building — to be 60 feet by 40 feet, with a belfry and cupola or dome on its east end rather than a steeple — was awarded to Captain Isaac Scudder for $1,138.48. By that time, for multiple reasons, the Society was in debt.

Cruson’s essay explains that the levying of a special tax in 1810 led to part of the debt being retired. The rest was paid off through the sale in 1812 of pew grounds, or the selling of floor space in which a Society member would have their pew constructed at their own expense. The pew became personal property and could be inherited.

Many of the building’s pews were passed down in families until 1874, when all pews were made free. While constructing the new meeting house, as much material as possible was salvaged from the original structure and used in the new one.

The granite steps leading to the front door of the building were among the items. The massive stone slabs had been donated in 1767 by Lt Nathaniel Briscoe, “who had two of his slaves quarry the stone and haul it by oxcart to the meeting house,” Cruson wrote.

Briscoe was also one of three men responsible for the donation of the church bell in 1763. The bell was sent to Fairfield in June 1767 to be recast. It was returned and rehung on July 3, 1767. It too moved from the first meeting house into the current building.

Cruson’s essay notes that the building “was probably usable by 1812, and services were definitely being held in the structure by 1816, but it was only a building shell since money was not available to finish it properly.”

The building’s first stove was installed by 1826, soon after the first stoves were introduced in the area, “thus breaking the unwritten rule that a meeting house must remain unheated,” Cruson noted. That first stove was installed in the back of the south aisle, near the southern entrance to the audience room. The building was pretty much a shell at the time, according to Cruson, “since money was not available to finish it properly.”

It was not until 1845 and the efforts of Reverend Jason Atwater that the congregation could afford to finish closing in the belfry, build a steeple, re-side and paint the exterior, and finish the building’s façade. Greek Revival elements were added to the front of the building. Pilasters were constructed on either side of the front entrance and at the corners of both belfry and the building itself, and cornice was added.

A basement was dug in 1852, and the floor of the meeting house was raised four feet, yielding enough room for the construction of a lower story lecture room. A stone foundation was also added at that time.

To compensate for the raised floor, the seven steps leading from the vestibule to the audience room were built. Additionally, new (the present) pews were built, the carpet was replaced, and a new pulpit, communion table and chairs were all built.

By 1873 the building looked very much as it does today. A chandelier was installed in 1894, and electricity arrived in 1914. A 15-foot addition was built at the west end of the gallery in 1957 to accommodate a newly purchased pipe organ.

Heritage Preservation Trust

Newtown Congregational Church met at 31 Main Street for over 200 years, until 1988. When the church moved into its new building at 14 West Street, its leaders deeded the meeting house to the Town of Newtown.

The building was taken over that year by Heritage Preservation Trust of Newtown, Inc. Sherry Paisley says the biggest concern for the building can be summed up in one word: Maintenance.

“It’s an old, old building. We’re constantly working on little things that come up,” she said.

“It’s amazingly well built,” she added, “and because we pay attention, we’re able to keep it in good shape, but it takes constant attention for the little things.”

Fundraising efforts began immediately. Similar to the sale of pew grounds nearly 175 years earlier, The Historic Trust offered the public the opportunity to “buy” a pillar or pew through the donation of $1,000 for a pew or $5,000 for a pillar. Each purchase was honored with the installation of a bronze plaque with the donor’s name on their element.

“People bought pews that they had sat in forever, and put their names on them, even though they weren’t going to church there anymore,” Paisley said. “Some of those families were very interested in keeping ‘their’ pews.”

One of the Trust’s first major projects was the replacement of the meeting house roof, done in 1991. A gala celebration was hosted by the Trust in December 1999,

In 2004 the Trust raised funds for the purchase of a Yamaha concert grand piano. The instrument is in the northwest corner of the audience room. An organ and full pipe organ are in the building’s balcony space.

In April 2010 the completion of a wheelchair ramp made the building handicapped accessible for the first time in its history. Until January of that year guests using wheelchairs could only enter the building if they were carried up the stairs from the sidewalk to the foyer, and then from there into the audience room.

Even for those with lesser difficulties, The Newtown Bee noted that year, gaining access to the main area could pose challenges for those with balance or vision problems or injuries.

“Mary Mitchell came to us and said, ‘I have wanted to come to so many of the presentations here, but I can’t get in through those steps,” Paisley recalled. “She gave $5,000 seed money, and we got that started.”

Construction began in September 2009, and a wheelchair lift was operational as of January 4, 2010. To preserve the integrity of the 18th Century building, the lift ascends inside the building into its main room from the lower level entry on the north side of the building off West Street — where the wheelchair/handicapped accessible ramp was added.

Paisley calls those additions “the best investment we’ve made.”

Did You Know…

*According to an August 2003 feature in The Newtown Bee, the entrance door on the first meeting house was on the long side of the building, facing south, toward Monroe.

*While local lore has it that French infantry men led by General Rochambeau during the Revolutionary War used the building’s rooster weather vane for target practice while passing through town in June-July 1781, the late Town Historian Dan Cruson worked hard to debunk that. Cruson said that while it was true someone certainly shot at the weather vane, it was not Rochambeau’s soldiers.

*Captain Isaac Scudder, who received the contract for the second meeting house building, was married to the great-great-granddaughter of Thomas Skidmore, who built the first meeting house.

*The replacement of the meeting house carpet in 1852, according to Dan Cruson, means “the old Puritan demands for stoic endurance of life in simple surroundings had obviously broken down by mid-19th Century.

*The meeting house is technically Newtown’s oldest church building. New Heights Baptist Church, the town’s youngest community of faith, continues the tradition of 31 Main Street being home to religious services.

*The building is also used for nondenominational weddings — it averages 50 ceremonies annually, according to Sherry Paisley — along with incidental worship services, funeral and memorial services, and other public programs. The memorial service for the late Newtown Bee Publisher R. Scudder Smith was conducted at Newtown Meeting House in August 2022.

*The meeting house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places — and also on the Connecticut Register of Historic Places.

*A 25-year-old man died and another was injured by electrocution during renovation work at the meeting house in July 2004. The men, both painters, received high-voltage shocks after an aluminum ladder they were handling made contact with a live power line.

*Newtown Choral Society and The Society of Creative Arts of Newtown regularly use the meeting house as their base. The choral society rehearses and performs at the historic location, and the art group hosts artist demonstrations and exhibitions. Concerts and recitals by other groups and studios continue to be a staple, and Flagpole Radio Café is planning a performance in March to benefit Ben’s Lighthouse.

*The meeting house and Main Street flagpole were featured on the Newtown Woman’s Club Christmas ornament in 1990. It was also part of the club’s “This Place Matters” series in 2011. The club recognized and celebrated seven historic buildings in town on a monthly basis that year.

*For Halloween 2007, three Bee Publishing Company employees dressed up as Main Street landmarks. Receptionist Sandy Tannone handled the front desk that day under the guise of Trinity Church, Bridget Seaman stood tall dressed as The Flagpole, and Sherri Smith Baggett was decked out as The Meeting House.

*There is no federal or state money in the meeting house. Maintenance is all through private donations, according to Sherry Paisley. Pew and pillar sponsorships are still available. Donations of all sizes are welcome. Contact Paisley at 203-270-8293 or visit newtownmeetinghouse.com.

=====

Managing Editor Shannon Hicks can be reached at shannon@thebee.com.