The Architecture of the Meeting House:

From Rumney Marsh to Revere

ROBERT FORREY

A serious house on serious earth it is

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

“Church Going,” Philip Larkin

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I: Raising the Meeting House

T he oak frame of the Rumney Marsh meeting house (shown above after the rotting steeple
was removed)1 was ceremoniously raised three hundred years ago on July 10, 1710, in a
bend of the old County Road, on what is now the corner of Beach and School Streets, in
Revere, a suburb just north of Boston. The year 1710 was very late for one of the oldest
settlements in the Boston area to be raising its first meeting house. Boston had its first meeting
house in 1632, Salem in 1635, and Marblehead around 1638. Lynn, just north of Rumney Marsh,
had a meeting house as early as 1632, and Malden, just to the west, had one by 1649. But
because of the importance in Puritan New England of meeting houses, which functioned as both
a church and a town hall, Rumney Marsh residents might justifiably have felt, whatever qualms
they may have had about the original steeple, “Better late than never.”
The ubiquitous Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), who functioned as chair of the meeting house
building committee, wrote in his diary (10 July 1710), “Mr. Jn o Marion [a deacon in the Second
Church of Boston] and I went to Rumney-Marsh to the Raising of their Meetinghouse. I drove a
pin, gave a 5s bill, had a very good treat at Mr. Chievers’s [Thomas Cheever]; went and came by
Winisimet [Ferry]” (Sewall 1973, 2: 639). Sewall was a well-to-do, generous, pious Puritan. The
5 shilling bill he gave at the raising was typical of the small gratuities he frequently dispensed,
though he was capable of larger bequests, and with his time he was even more generous. He and
two other members of the building committee were back in Rumney Marsh a week later (18 July
1710), on a hot day, to make arrangements about the windows with Samuel Stowers, a
carpenter-builder who lived nearby in Mystic Side, which is now the city of Everett
[ CITATION Cor99 \p "274, n. 32" \l 1033 ].
In 1983, a member of the Massachusetts Historical Commission wrote that the significance
of the Rumney Marsh meeting house “lies in the fact that it is the earliest surviving frame
church in Suffolk County and certainly one of the earliest in the Commonwealth”[ CITATION
For87 \p "102, n." \t \l 1033 ]. While the meeting house was originally Puritan, i.e.,
Congregational, it eventually became Unitarian. The claim would be made, around the time of its
two-hundredth anniversary, in 1910, that it was the second oldest Unitarian meeting house in
America. As its three hundredth anniversary approaches, in 2010, the meeting house, much
altered, may also be among the oldest public buildings in continual use in Massachusetts. But
the ultimate significance of the meeting house may not be any of these putative “firsts.” What
makes it most noteworthy is that it is a building with a long, interesting, and neglected history, a
history that is reflected in the architectural changes it has undergone over the centuries.
Those architectural changes, and the history they reflect, are the focus of this essay, but the
architectural changes were accompanied by even greater religious changes: from Calvinism, to
Unitarianism, to Freemasonry; that is, from the American nightmare—the “horrors of the
Calvinist religion,” as M. Halsey Thomas called them (1973, 1: 345), to the American dream;
from predestination, innate depravity, and damnation, to the onward and upward forever spirit of
Unitarianism, which Horatio Alger, Sr., a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School, expressed
in four essays in the Unitarian Advocate and Miscellany.2 His son Horatio Alger, Jr. would later

1
The engraver of the sketch, which appeared in Chamberlain’s A Documentary History of Chelsea,
was Samuel Smith Kilburn (1831-1903), who did a similar sketch for the chapter Mellen Chamberlain
wrote for The Memorial History of Boston, 4 vols. (Boston: 1886): 2: 378.
 3

give expression to Unitarian optimism, in a very different format, in his hundred or so so-called
strive-and-succeed, rags-to-riches dime novels.

II: The Steeple

The farmers in Rumney Marsh had petitioned the selectmen in Boston for a meeting house.
in 1706, but they were too poor to pay for it themselves. The money for the construction was
provided by the Boston selectmen, who appointed the building committee, which was
“impowered to direct, both as to the place and manner of Erecting S d meeting
House”[ CITATION Cha08 \p "II, 183" \l 1033 ]. The committee and Sewall, who functioned as
chairman, had the responsibility for the “manner of Erecting,” which probably included the
responsibility of choosing the design. At the very least, the design would have required
Sewall’s approval, but he probably was much more directly involved, both with the design and
construction, than that. He would have been concerned not only with the windows but also
with the steeple. Of the more than two-hundred meeting houses Marian C. Donnelly researched
for The New England Meeting Houses of the Seventeenth Century, not a single one, until 1699,
the last year of the century, had a steeple, and that was Boston’s Brattle Street meeting house
[ CITATION Don681 \p 79-80 \l 1033 ].
In a conservative rural community such as Rumney Marsh, a steeple was a dramatic
departure from seventeenth-century meeting house architecture. In 1710, the same year the
Rumney Marsh meeting house was built, the minister in Chelmsford, who admired the design of
the Brattle Street meeting house, tried unsuccessfully to persuade his building committee to
include a steeple in the design of their new meeting house[ CITATION Ken89 \p 243 \l 1033 ].
The Chelmsford church records include the following misspelled entry: “Voted a concurrence to
the Comitys proposalls in all things as to finishing the meting hous which we have agreed to
build in chelmsford except the stepell”[ CITATION Wat17 \p 677 \l 1033 ]. Except the steeple!
The Chelmsford congregation apparently wanted nothing to do with steeples, which were still
associated in the minds of some New England Puritans with Catholic and Anglican churches.3
Given the liberal bent of the Brattle Street congregation, and especially of its founder,
Thomas Brattle, it was not surprising they would be the first to depart from the staid, steeple-
less meeting houses of the seventeenth century. And it was not surprising that the second
meeting house in the Boston area to have a steeple would be the third meeting house of the First
Church in Cambridge, built in 1706, since Thomas Brattle was on its building committee and his
brother William was the minister. It was not just peculiar, however, but downright perplexing
2
Horatio Alger, Sr., published the four essays in the Unitarian Advocate and Miscellany in 1831 and
1832: “What Constitutes a Man a Christian?” (Sept. 1831); “On the Proem to St. John’s Gospel” (Jan.
1832); “The Testimony of the Apostles Concerning Our Lord” (Sept. 1832); and “The Imperfect
Influence of Christianity” (Oct. 1832). What Alger does in the course of these essays is define the
important differences between Unitarianism and Trinitarianism: For the Unitarians, God is one, not three;
Christ is not the son of God; free will, not predestination, determines human destiny; and human
nature is innately good, not evil.
3
In the abstract of his 1964 Princeton dissertation, Early Anglican Architecture 1558-1662, John M.
Schnorrenberg explained why and in what ways early Anglican architecture bore such a close
resemblance to Catholic architecture. “The Anglican Reformation was cautious and conservative; so was
the first Anglican architecture” Because it too closely resembled Catholic architecture, Puritans were
unhappy with the conservative Anglican architecture.
 4

that the third Congregational meeting house in the Boston area to have a steeple would be the
stick-in-the-mud rural settlement of Rumney Marsh. Rural folk are proverbially resistant to
social and religious change, so why would it be any different for architecture? There was no
reason to think Rumney Marsh would be different from Chelmsford or other rural settlements in
that respect
The original appropriation for the Rumney Marsh meeting house was a modest 100 pounds,
but the Boston selectmen for some reason later reduced it to a paltry 50 pounds. To get a sense
of the relative value of 50 pounds, William Brattle at the time of his death in 1717 was being
paid 100 pounds annually as minister of the Cambridge church [ CITATION McK73 \p 138 \t \l
1033 ], and ministers were proverbially underpaid Cutting the appropriation in half meant the
Rumney Marsh steeple would have to go without a bell. The expense of importing a bell from
England would have been prohibitively expensive. The Malden meeting house had also been too
poor to afford a bell, going without one for about thirty years, but the Rumney Marsh meeting
house had to do without one for over a century, not getting one until 1832, during the pastorate of.
Horatio Alger, Sr.[ CITATION Shu38 \p 434 \l 1033 ].

III: Puritan Architecture

Old-style Puritan meeting house in Malden (c. 1659)

“The Puritans who came to New England in 1630 had no intention of building steeples,” the
author of The Steeples of Old New England wrote. “They had in fact no intention of building
anything that resembled a church[ CITATION Shi991 \p 315 \l 1033 ]. A typical seventeenth-
century New England meeting house, Ahlstrom wrote, was “a plain and usually small building,
 5

with a centered pulpit, no holy altar (only a serviceable table) and no ‘popish’ tower until a much
later day”[ CITATION Sid73 \p 173 \l 1033 ]. The older meeting houses in Lynn, Malden,
Salem Village and Medford were built in the boxy, anti-papist style of the seventeenth century,
when most meeting houses looked more like barns than churches. They were usually squarish,
sometimes with four-sided roofs, sometimes with a bell turret or a cupola on the center of the
roof, as in the Malden meeting house (shown above). In contrast to the Scholasticism-inspired
European Gothic architecture, in which there was an obsession with division and sub-division,
with ever greater elaboration[ CITATION Pan85 \p 36 \l 1033 ], the Puritans preferred
simplicity to complexity, the squarish to the rectangular, and the centered belfry or cupola to
the steeple. They wanted no part of the presumptuous, prideful sky-scraping steeples preferred
by papists and Anglicans.
If it had been left up to the conservative farmers of Rumney Marsh and the dour Thomas
Cheever (1658-1749), their first minister, the architecture of their meeting house might have
resembled the square, barn-like building in Malden, where, when much younger, Cheever had
previously served as minister, from 1681 to1686. As a young man, Cheever had been a
hotheaded radical, a cursing curate, and a Calvinist skirt chaser, but after being expelled from the
Malden church and moving to Rumney Marsh, he became increasingly conservative and
intractable the older he got, and he lived into his nineties. By then his eyes were fixed
repentantly on an idealized Puritan past. But the Rumney Marsh meeting house was built with
money provided by the selectmen of Boston, and the construction was overseen not by Cheever
but by Sewall and several other Boston gentlemen, representing the selectmen. Consequently, the
architecture of the meeting house reflected the prevailing ethos of Boston, not Rumney Marsh,
and there was a distinct, even striking, difference between the two. Boston and Rumney Marsh
were only six miles from each other, but they were, in spite of their proximity, worlds apart.
“How close and yet how far” was a recurring refrain in the history of the town.

IV: The Godfather

A long-haired rather than a closely cropped Puritan,

Samuel Sewall (shown left) strongly disapproved of wigs
for men (even for bald men). He also disapproved of
mixed dancing and the celebration of Christmas. But his
cultural and religious horizons had been broadened and
his tastes refined by travel, both in New and old
England. As Rick Kennedy pointed out, Sewall had
shown no particular interest in domestic or church
architecture prior to a trip to England, in 1689. But
under the tutelage of his fellow American Thomas
Brattle, the future founder and designer of the Brattle
Street Church, Sewall in England developed an interest
in architecture. He went sightseeing with Brattle, taking
in cathedrals and castles, as well as smaller public and
private buildings, sometimes carefully measuring their
length and width with Brattle’s ruler, as if a structure
could not be fully appreciated, or understood Samuel
Sewall, godfather and architectus ingenio of the meeting house, until its dimensions and floor plan
were known. As a New England Puritan abroad, Sewall became something of a budding
 6

architect. The two Americans showed a special interest in the architecture of churches and
meeting houses. They went to the town of Deal, in Kent, for example, for the express purpose of
seeing a new meeting house, and a few days later went to look at an old church that had recently
added a steeple. In his diary, Sewall described church towers and steeples in England without
any suggestion that they might be specters of Papist corruption or Anglican complicity. However
begrudgingly and provincially, he seemed impressed by them. In
visiting Coventry, where his grandfather had been mayor, he went
into the steeple of an Anglican church and later described the gilded
cross on top of it as “a noble thing” (1973, I:209), a curious
observation given the negative attitude of New England Puritans
toward both steeples and crosses.
John Calvin, as Donnelly pointed out (1968, 20), did not show
any interest in church architecture in general and in steeples in
particular. The Catholic cathedral of St. Pierre, in Geneva, which
he appropriated as his ecclesiastical home, was historically and
conspicuously Catholic in its pointed architecture and exquisite
steeple (Walker 1906, 174, 194), but that apparently did not bother
him. He did not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater or the
cathedrals with the Catholics. He criticized the idolatrous icons and
art placed, and the false rites practiced and doctrines preached,
within Catholic churches, but he did not criticize the architecture of
those churches..
It would have been interesting to know what Sewall’s reactions
might have been to the St. Pierre cathedral, and its steeple (shown
left), but his travels did not take him to Switzerland. He did see
several of the famous cathedrals of England, including Canterbury,
which he first viewed at dusk, describing it as “a very lofty and
magnificent building,” but then adding a Puritan reproof, “but of
little use.” The cathedral at Salisbury he found “very neat and
stately” and its spire “excellent for height and beauty,” adding no
reproofs. At Windsor Castle he measured or somehow obtained the
width, length, and height of the Queen’s bedchamber, the King’s
public dining room, etc., with no comment (Sewall 1973, 1: 193,
198, 215). He carried his expanded architectural awareness and
unPuritan tolerance back to Boston. Abbott L. Cummings has shown
how Sewall, among others, broke with tradition by adapting English
Renaissance elements to domestic architecture in Boston
[ CITATION Cum83 \p 48-49 \t \l 1033 ]. Since domestic
architecture influenced ecclesiastical architecture in
Boston[ CITATION Cum79 \p 10 \t \l 1033 ], Sewall apparently
played a role, however small and indirect, in the changes in
meeting house design that took place in New England in the
eighteenth century. But in regard to the design of the Rumney Marsh meeting house, his role
was probably large and direct. Architecturally, as well as in other ways, he could be called the
godfather of the Rumney Marsh meeting house. In the architectural terminology of the time, the
architectus ingenio was “the one who conceived the form of the building and was responsible for
 7

overseeing the builders” (Kennedy 1989, 239). As Thomas Brattle was the architectus ingenio
for the Brattle Street, Sewall was for the Rumney Marsh meeting house. Though consistently
pious and ploddingly faithful to the New England Way prior to his visit to England, Sewall
afterwards would occasionally glance, if only with one eye, at the steepled, unPuritan future.
He was not conscious of and would have been mortified to realize the liberal changes he was
helping to bring about. Following the example of the Brattle Street steeple, the Rumney Marsh
steeple pointed not just up, to heaven, but also ahead, prophetically, to the future, to the
Enlightenment and Unitarianism.
Sewall has been called one of the last of the Puritans, and he was to the end of his long life “a
true lover of the First Ways of New England,” to borrow one of his phrases (Sewall 1973, 2:
734), but in some respects he was a forerunner of the Unitarians. Not only was he a supporter of
the Half-Way Covenant, which ameliorated the church status of non-communicants in
Congregational churches, he was among the first New England Puritans to plead for the rights of
Negroes and women. Because of Sewall’s sympathy for Negroes, and his tepid support of the
Mathers in their feud with Harvard, Cotton Mather in a pique had accused him of being “one
who pleaded much for Negros,” but who treated his father, Increase, “worse than a Neger”
[ CITATION MHa73 \p "I, 454-455" \t \l 1033 ]. Mather was in effect calling Sewall a “Neger
lover.” On the basis of the sympathy he expressed for women in his essay “Talitha Cumi”
(1925),” Sewall could also have been called a “woman lover,” and since as architectus ingenio
he bore at least some responsibility for the design of the Rumney Marsh meeting house, a
“steeple lover.”

V: Race, Class, and Sex

The exterior of the Rumney Marsh meeting house and the steeple in particular may have
pointed to the future, and the rights of man, as Thomas Paine would define them, but the interior
of the meeting house revealed the unrighteousness of man—more specifically the undemocratic,
racist and sexist prejudices of the Anglo-Saxon males who dominated Puritan New England. In
his diary entry for the formal gathering of the First Church of Christ at Rumney Marsh, which
took place on October 19, 1715, five years after the raising of the meeting house, The five year
delay between the raising of the meeting house and the formation of the First Church and ordination of
Cheever may have been the result of differences on whether he was the best candidate. Partly on the
grounds that there were “great divisions being among us,” there had been opposition to having a meeting
house (Shurtleff 1938, 421), and there may have been opposition to having Cheever as minister. In any
event, when Sewall attending the gathering of the church, he mentioned “sitting in my Pue; ‘tis a
good one, which never sat in before [ CITATION MHa73 \p "2: 802" \t \l 1033 ]. Sewall would
only rarely sit in his pew, for he was a member of Boston’s Second Church. The seating
arrangements in the Rumney Marsh meeting house reflected the typical segregated, hierarchical
character of the Puritan community. Sewall may have been ahead of his time in supporting the
rights of Negroes and women, but overhead in the meeting house he had been the archetectus
ingenio of were galleries segregated on the basis of race and sex. There was, according to
Shurtleff, a gallery up on one side for female slaves and a gallery on the other side for male
slaves. Slave galleries were then called “slaves’ pews,” and in the racist slang of a later day
“nigger heaven.” There was, if Shurtleff was correct, a third gallery of the meeting house, on the
western side, for white women. All four groups—white males, white females, black males, and
black females—had, according to Shurtleff, separate entrances to the meeting house, which
sounds hard to believe. Sewall relied in part on information supplied by Chamberlain in his
 8

Documentary History[ CITATION Cha08 \p " 2: 302" \n \l 1033 ]. In a chapter on Rumney

Marsh in The Memorial History of Boston, Chamberlain wrote that the doors at the front and rear
of the meetinghouse were for male and female slaves who were segregated in the galleries
(1886, 2: 378, n.).
There was also, among the propertied white males on the ground floor, a further form of
segregation, because the location and size of a pew reflected the financial and social standing of
its owner. The bigger the pew and the closer it was to the pulpit, the more important the man
who occupied it. Sewall was one of the most important Puritans in Massachusetts. When he
described his pew as a “good one,” he probably meant that, among other advantages, it was close
to the pulpit, in contrast to the pew-less who sat in the back on benches and the slaves, up in the
galleries. Instead of each man and woman being equal before God, the Rumney Marsh meeting
house tended to reaffirm class, racial, and gender hierarchies.
Edmund W. Sinnott pointed out that, “As did the Puritan himself, the meetinghouse changed
with the years. His houses of worship faithfully mirrored the alterations in his social and
religious life. . . . The meetinghouse has always illuminated the character of the men who
worshiped in it, and a study of its architectural evolution provides us with a vivid insight into the
changes that took place in the Puritan himself.” According to Sinnott, the shift from the older,
squarer, medieval-style to the Renaissance-influenced, rectangular, steepled meeting house
occurred early in the eighteenth century. Ironically, he suggested historians of New England
should pay close attention to what was happening around 1710. That the 1710 Rumney Marsh
meeting house escaped Sinnott’s notice is understandable since it was located in the boondocks
of Boston, and was historically overshadowed by bigger, more important and more illustrious
meeting houses. No meeting house in the Boston area could compare in scale and beauty to
Boston’s Old South [Congregational] Church, which was built in 1729. The earliest example of
the new architectural style that Sinnott could find was the Nantucket church, built around 1711,
and the West Barnstable church, built in 1717[ CITATION Sin \p "13, 19, 42-43" \t \l 1033 ]. In
the steeple chase, the Brattle Street meeting house (1699) was first, the Cambridge meeting
house was second (1706), and the Rumney Marsh meeting house (1710), apparently, was third.
There were no major architectural changes to the meeting house in the first hundred years of
its existence. There were, however, several minor ones. In the false hope that the meeting house
was belatedly going to get a bell, the platform in the steeple was repaired in 1745. Other minor
repairs were recorded in the church records. For example, in 1771, money was raised to pay for
boards, shingles, nails, and labor for what was already being referred to as the “old
meetinghouse” [ CITATION Cha08 \p "2: 297" \l 1033 ]. In part to accommodate the sickly
Unitarian minister Joseph Tuckerman (1778-1844), the first stove was installed in 1817, which
would have required some minor carpentry. But it was not until 1823 that the first important
renovation occurred. In the process of painting the meeting house, it was discovered that the
steeple had rotted beyond repair. Church records are silent on who made the decision to replace
it with the cupola shown in the engraving by Kilburn.
VI: Rival Churches

The conservative members of the First Church, who called themselves Evangelicals rather
than Calvinists, found the liberal Unitarian theology Tuckerman had introduced unacceptable,
and they broke away in 1828, establishing the Evangelical Congregational Society and building
a rival church on the Salem Turnpike (now called Broadway), about a half a mile away. The
Evangelicals called it the Orthodox Church, though it was also sometimes referred to as the
 9

Evangelical Church. Two decades later, the Evangelical Congregational Society had outgrown
the church on the Salem Turnpike and built a large new one, in 1849, almost directly across from
the meeting house, on the old County Road. It was probably no coincidence that the “new”
Congregational (Evangelical) Church was located almost directly across the road from the “old”
Congregational (now Unitarian) meeting house. In choosing a site across from the meeting
house, the Evangelicals appeared to be throwing down the gauntlet and challenging their rivals
to a duel, not unlike the later infamous one between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton.
Unfortunately for the First Church, it would turn out to be, in the analogy, Alexander
Hamilton.
Just seven years after the 1849 construction of the new rival church across the road by the
Evangelical Congregationalists, the Unitarian Congregationalists, in 1856, spurred by the
women’s Sewing Circle, undertook a major renovation of the meeting house that resulted in a
virtually new building. “The frame of the building is immensely strong, and upon it a nearly new
church will be constructed,” a reporter wrote in the Boston Herald in 1856. (The undated
newspaper clipping is pasted into a church record book in the City Clerk’s Office at the Revere City
Hall.)

Meeting house after the major 1856 renovation

The meeting house was turned around ninety degrees, which had the effect, intended or not,
of directly confronting—of going head to head—with the rival church across the road. It was
during the 1856 renovation that the arrangement of the interior space of the meeting house was
radically changed, with the pulpit being moved to what became the back of the building, on the
west, and at what became the front, on the east, a main entrance was constructed through the
base of the cupola tower. What was previously the main entrance, on what had been the north
side of the meeting house, was eliminated[ CITATION Shu38 \p 435 \l 1033 ]. These changes
 10

were even more significant than the original steeple had been, because aligning the interior
space along the long axis had been obligatory in Puritan New England meeting house
architecture in the seventeenth and on into the eighteenth century. Even after meeting houses
became rectangular in shape, with steeples, the pulpit continued to be located at the center of one
of the long sides [ CITATION Whi64 \p 106-110 \l 1033 ].
The 1856 renovation was a major architectural change, but the theological changes that had
been taking place ever since Tuckerman had become minister in 1801 were even greater. The
church that had begun theologically in 1715 as very conservative had by 1876 become so
liberal that in that year the church engaged a minister who if he was not a closet atheist when he
arrived certainly was openly so after he left. Lemuel K. Washburn (1846-1927) eventually
became the second most notorious atheist in the United States, second only to his hero, Robert
Ingersoll (Forrey, 2004). It would be hard to imagine any two ministers who had ever preached
in the meeting house being the polar opposites that Cheever and Washburn were. The turnaround
theologically in the meeting house from 1715 to 1876 was not ninety but a hundred and eighty
degrees.

Rival (renovated) Congregational Church, 1884

 11

In 1884, reflecting the congregation’s continued growth, the Evangelical Congregational

Church building underwent a major renovation. The auditorium was raised, a vestry, a ladies’
parlor, a kitchen were added. So were stained glass windows and an organ, aesthetic additions
their seventeenth-century Puritan ancestors would not have tolerated. Architecturally, the
renovated Evangelical Congregational Church had become domesticated, a woman’s touch
evident throughout. A woman’s place was no longer just the kitchen and the parlor at home but
the kitchen and ladies’ parlor of the church.
The Evangelical Congregationalists renamed their church the First Congregational Church
of Revere, considering themselves, rather the Unitarian-Congregationalists across the road, the
true heirs of Cheever and First Church of Christ at Rumney Marsh. The Evangelical-
Congregationalists felt that even though they did not occupy the meeting house, they were the
ones carrying on its Puritan spirit, the stained glass windows, the organ and the auditorium stage
notwithstanding. But the architectural renovations in the Evangelical Congregational church
building speak volumes about the social and religious changes that were taking place in the town,
and New England, in the nineteenth century. It was not just the Unitarians who were abandoning
the old-time fire-and-brimstone religion for odd-fellow. good works gemütlichkeit. While
paying lip service to original sin, and holding on to the Trinity, Calvinistic Evangelicals were
easing up on damnation and focusing more on the potluck than the Last Supper.
Following the 1884 renovation, the Evangelicals inaccurately and somewhat presumptuously
renamed their church not the first Orthodox, or First Evangelical Church, but the First
Congregational Church of Revere. In response, the actual first Congregational church, which
began in 1715 as the First Church of Christ in Rumney Marsh, started identifying itself, for the
first time since its founding, as the First Congregational Church. So the town had rival First
Congregational churches when it was not certain, given the successive waves of non-Protestant
immigrants, that the town could any longer support one. The irony is that by the time the church
that had started out as the First Church of Christ in Rumney Marsh first identified itself as
Congregational, about a century and half after its founding, it was already Unitarian in
everything but name. But like other New England Congregational churches that had made a
similar gradual, quiet—some would say surreptitious—transition from Trinitarianism to
Unitarianism, it chose not to admit it was a Unitarian church. If all the churches that had become
Unitarian admitted as much, Congregationalists might have had legal grounds for claiming they,
not the Unitarians, should have control of the church.
With the ordination of the androgynous looking, intensely emotional, proto-Unitarian Joseph
Tuckerman in the First Church, in 1801, a new era can be said to have begun in the town, an era
in which both the First Church and, later, the rival Evangelical Congregational Church
underwent changes that Anne Douglas characterized, in the title of her 1977 book, as The
Feminization of New England Culture. Once the primary masculine leader, the alpha male in
the community, the Puritan parson had become transformed into a nurturing, feminized
Unitarian minister. In keeping with the transformation of the jealous, vengeful God of the Old
into the loving God of the New Testament, the Son of the three-gods-in-one came to overshadow
the omnipotent Father. In the domestication of New England Protestantism, women had become
the mainstay not just in the meeting house but also in the Evangelical church across the road. In
the nineteenth century, the business of America had become business, men’s business, and
religion had become, by default, largely women’s business.

VII: Doomed by Demographics

 12

The presence of the rival Congregational church across the road proved fatal for the
Unitarian church, which had difficulty coming to terms with the fact that the town was better
suited to Evangelicals than Unitarians, more hospitable, that is, to conservative than liberal
Protestants. It did not help when, as part of the Unitarian overexpansion that took place after the
Civil War, that construction of a small Unitarian church was begun in the Beachmont section of
Revere in 1885, though the building was not finished until 1889. The founding of Unity Chruch,
as it was named, was as unwise as the 1887 renovation of the the meeting house. By 1906,
Unity Church dissolved. In the meanwhile, the number of Evangelicals in the rival
Congregational church increased slowly in the late nineteenth century, while the number of
Unitarians in the meeting house, proportionally, declined.
In spite of that decline, the Unitarians in the First Church refused to take a back seat to the
Congregationalists. Better educated and prominent in business and the professions, as well as in
town government, the Unitarians, particularly the women, felt they were superior, more
cultured and refined. They were, judging by the programs they held in the auditorium of the
meeting house, where it was Mozart and tableau vivant while on the stage across the road it was
more homespun fare. The Unitarians may have been justified in thinking of themselves a cut
above the more countrified Congregationalists, but they probably also deserved their reputation
for being standoffish and cold. That’s apparently what Emerson had in mind when he
complained in the “Divinity School Address” (1838) about the “corpse-cold Unitarianism of
Brattle Street.” But it was not the Unitarians’ alleged lifelessness but their low birth rate that
was their Achilles’ heel, at least in Revere. Their problem was not so much their lack of religious
enthusiasm but their reluctance, or inability, to propagate sufficiently.
It is observable historically that the more educated, elevated and refined a group, class, or
nation becomes, and the higher its standard of living, the lower its birthrate, while the lower
classes propagate disproportionately. The Unitarians were doomed demographically. In
seventeenth century New England, the Puritans had been prolific breeders. Given the high
mortality rate among children, they had to be in order to perpetuate the colony. Sewall and his
first wife had fourteen children. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when infant
mortality rates had sharply declined, it was the immigrants and especially the Catholics who
were prolific. Protestant Revere, and Unitarians in particular, became numerically overwhelmed
by fecund Catholic immigrants. The birthrates of the Irish- and Italian-Americans were as high
as they were in part because the Catholic Church strongly opposed any form of birth control.
In the early nineteenth century, the meeting house became the battle ground between
conservatives and liberals, but after the Civil War, with the conservatives ensconced in their
own church, the split in the meeting house was between moderate and radical Unitarians. In July
1877, at a meeting of what was called pointedly the “legal parish committee of the First Church,”
which was led by a justice of the peace, it was decided to paint inside and outside the building.
While the repairs on the one hundred and sixty-seven year old building were no doubt needed,
keeping it closed for the rest of the summer was obviously an attempt to prevent Lemuel K.
Washburn, who had recently been expelled by the “legal parish committee,” from conducting
services. The parish committee had gone so far as changing the locks, but Washburn and his
supporters gained entrance with a skeleton key. Not the kind of Unitarian minister who could be
accused of feminizing New England culture, Washburn once inside got into a wrestling match
with the justice of the peace. When services were resumed that fall, the meeting house had a
new minister. However, when the church attempted to summon the congregation to hear the new
 13

minister’s inaugural sermon, it was discovered that somebody—possibly a supporter of

Washburn—had removed the clapper from the bell, the same bell it had taken the church over a
century to acquire. An enterprising member of the congregation got a hammer, climbed up into
the cupola, and struck the bell. Once settled into the recently painted interior, the new minister
preached his inaugural sermon, taking as his text, according to a local newspaper, The Chelsea
Telegraph & Pioneer, “Lord, what wilt Thou have me do?” (20 Oct.1877, p. 2).
When he left the meeting house, Washburn took a splinter group with him, establishing yet
another rival group, called the First Independent Society, which held services in the Revere
Town Hall. The First Church could not afford to lose any more members, even atheists, and it
certainly could not afford another major renovation of the meeting house. But when the
Evangelists renovated and expanded their church in 1884, the Unitarians in 1887 followed suit in
a copycat renovation (shown left). The meeting house was raised to add a vestry and a ladies’
parlor, and the cupola was replaced by a tower steeple that closely resembled the one across the
road.
 14

Meeting house after 1887 renovation

Unitarianism had emerged from the Civil War as a very prosperous denomination, or
association, as it preferred to call itself, and Boston was the capital of American Unitarianism.
William Ellery Channing, considered the father of American Unitarianism, had been the
lifelong minister of Boston’s Federal Street Church, which was thought to be the wealthiest
Unitarian congregation in the country. The central offices of the American Unitarian Association
(A.U.A.), its treasury overflowing, were located on exclusive Beacon Hill. With its deep
pockets, the A.U.A. had established a Church Building Loan Fund, which made it possible for
less prosperous Unitarian societies, particularly those in rural districts or in more remote states,
to build or renovate churches.
 15

Revere was only six miles from Boston, but because of its troubled history and tradition of
rural poverty, it was still in another world—economically, socially, and culturally. The Unitarian
church in Revere had come to depend on a small annual grant-in-aid from the A.U.A., which
helped pay the minister's salary. But instead of swallowing their pride, economizing, and
adjusting to their loss of status, Revere’s Unitarians borrowed from the A.U.A. Building Loan
Fund to help pay for the second major renovation in thirty years. The cost of the 1887
renovation was about $4,700; the A.U.A. loan was for $2,000, which sounds modest, but after
twenty years the church had not repaid half the loan.
An estimated four hundred people crowded the renovated meeting house for the dedication in
April 1888. The size of the Unitarian congregation was considerably less than four hundred, so
among the crowd were probably at least some curious Congregationalists and possibly a few of
the radical Unitarians who had followed the free-thinking Washburn out of the church. In the
last decade of the nineteenth century, while the Congregational congregation continued to grow
gradually, the Unitarian congregation continued to shrink inexorably, making it increasingly
difficult to pay off the A.U.A. building loan. Between 1887 and 1891 there had been two
recessions and in 1899-1900 there had been a third. By 1898, when Samuel A. Eliot became the
president of the A.U.A., it no longer had the deep pockets it had a quarter century earlier. The
turn of the century was belt-tightening time for the A.U.A., and the fiscally and theologically
conservative Eliot seemed a born belt-tightener. He cut back on grants-in-aid and required that
outstanding loans be paid off as soon as possible. In a move that reflected the hard economic
times, he encouraged struggling Unitarian churches to combine, where possible, with their
Congregational cousins.
Considering the estrangement and underlying bitterness that had developed in the town in
the nineteenth century between conservative and liberal Protestants, a reconciliation between
Unitarians and Congregationalist was unlikely, if not impossible. What stood in the way, first,
was theology, including the question, “Is God one or three-in-one?” There was also the issue of
the role of fire-and-brimstone preaching It was the case with some Protestants that when the
hell-fires cooled, when God lost his Old Testament punitiveness, religion lost a lot of its morbid
appeal.
But the social and cultural differences were an even bigger impediment. In spite of their
precarious finances, there is no evidence the Unitarians in Revere ever considered reconciling
with their Congregational cousins. Once the elite group in town, the Unitarians had outlived
their prime but not their pride. But even if the Unitarians had been willing to bury the hatchet, it
is unlikely the Congregationalists would have been interested. In Revere, at least,
Congregationalists had proved they could survive without Unitarians, but the Unitarians had not
proved they could survive without Congregationalists. Since their buildings had become quite
similar architecturally, why couldn’t the churches become similar theologically? Perhaps
because, as John Calvin, the ultimate authority for Congregationalists had shown, the
architecture of a church was not important; it was the architecture of the Church, the creed, that
was crucial. The presence or absence of a steeple or the shape of the floor plan was neither here
nor there, but what the people in a church believed about God, the sacraments, sin, etc., those
things were of infinite importance because upon them depended salvation, at least according to
believers.

VIII: First (and Last) Female Minister

 16

In 1910, the two hundredth anniversary of the raising of the meeting house, Mary L. Leggett
(1854-1938), having been preceded by at least twenty-six male ministers, became the first
female to occupy the pulpit (Weis 1947, 392);. She would also turn out to be the last minister of
either sex to occupy the pulpit. Women had become the mainstay of the First Church during the
nineteenth century, from Tuckerman’s pastorate onward, so it was only fitting that it should
have, however belatedly, a female minister. Leggett did not have a tarnished past, as Cheever,
the first minister, had, but she had had a somewhat troubled one, never staying long in one place,
moving back and forth between the Northeast and the Southwest. As Cheever had been, she
was in the twilight of her career. She was hired as a kind of hospice nurse for the church, which
was terminally ill. It was not a position a male minister with any prospects would likely be
interested in, not if he was compos mentis. One of Leggett’s predecessors believed he was
“leading the life of the Second Christ,” and that he would not shave, bathe, or pay his bills,
A.U.A. Secretary-at-Large Louis C. Cornish wrote to a Henry M. Williams (A.U.A. Archives 22
April, 1915).
Leggett did not suffer from delusions, but she may have suffered a nervous breakdown
earlier in her career. In any event, she was hampered by psychological and personality problems.
Admitting to having led a stressful life, and of having been high strung, she referred in a letter
to having been stretched to the breaking point by harsh use. But how many single women
struggling to make their way in a man’s world, where at least some males in authority
occasionally acted as if they were Christ—how many women in such a world would not develop
emotional or psychological problems? Leggett could not escape sexism even in the liberal
Unitarian movement, even from the highest officials. No less than the president of the A.U.A.,
Samuel A. Eliot, believed a woman’s place was in the home, not the pulpit (Wright 1989, 100).
The opportunity that opened up for Leggett in Revere, late in what was at best a checkered
career, might have seemed providential. She appeared grateful, but what she was being given
was not so much a second as a final chance. Fifty-four years old when she was hired, she may
have had premonitions that this opportunity was the last she would have. Naturally, after so
many disappointments, she wanted to make it last as long and be as successful as possible.
An ad hoc parish committee, the Committee of Ten, as it was called, had been established in
1916. with Stanley T. Fenno, a science teacher at Revere High School, as its chairman. A
descendant of John Fenno, a businessman who had been a pillar of the First Church and
Horatio Alger’s father-in-law, Stanley Fenno may have reflected the shift of loyalty of the
town’s males away from Protestantism, and Unitarianism in particular, toward Masonry, where
men could be men, and instead of being divided by denominationalism, and distracted by
women, could be united in a sacred, semi-secret brotherhood. The avowed aim of the
committee, as Fenno explained in a letter to Louis C. Cornish, was “to raise funds to pay off the
church’s indebtedness” (A.U.A. Archives 26 Oct. 1916). Curiously, Leggett does not appear to
have been a member of the committee. If she wasn’t, it was possible no woman was. Women
may have still been the mainstay of the church, but men were still the masters..
Perhaps with some justification, the Committee of Ten, or at least Fenno, may have
concluded the First Church was a hopeless case. He appeared to have a hidden agenda. If Leggett
was not the pawn of the Committee of Ten, or of Fenno, she was at least the fall gal.
Subsequent events suggest the aim of committee was not to save the church for the Unitarians
but to save the meeting house for the Masons. The stonewalling and obstructionism of the
committee may have been Fenno’s way of preventing the A.U.A. from taking title to the
meeting house. At one point, the A.U.A., at Leggett’s suggestion, had drawn up an
 17

understanding whereby the A.U.A. would suspend the church’s debt, take title to the meeting
house, and hold it in trusteeship until such time as the Revere Unitarian Society could repay the
remainder of the building loan. Leggett had been the one to first propose this understanding, but
at the last minute the rug was pulled out from under her and the A.U.A., apparently by Fenno and
the Committee of Ten.
If she had not realized it before she was hired, at a meager fifty dollars a month, Leggett
likely did soon afterwards: the church was in its death throes. During the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, during successive tides of immigration, waves of Catholic and Jewish
immigrants arrived in Revere, and a number of Protestants moved out in what could be called
Protestant flight. By one estimate, there were only thirty to forty Unitarians left in Revere by
1918. Undeterred by demographics, the plucky Leggett made a valiant if somewhat desperate
effort to save the church. In her campaign, she took advantage of the two hundredth anniversary
of the raising of the meeting house to make it the focus of her fundraising efforts. She made the
case that the meeting house was a venerable architectural monument that must, along with the
church, be preserved. She sent out appeals for funds on stationery that included the Kilburn
sketch and a more recent photo of the meetinghouse in the letterhead.
If the meeting house was old and somewhat the worse for wear, and in need of repair, she
felt it had, like herself, a lot of life left. “There is really life left in this ancient Church,” she
wrote. Cornish, “altho’ the financial difficulties have nearly smothered its spiritual flame”
(A.U.A. Archives 10 Oct. 1916). She was well seasoned but not yet ready for retirement. Good
at public relations, she organized a commemoration for the two hundredth anniversary of the
raising of the meeting house, to take place on July 10, 1910. With her talent for public relations,
she got the local newspaper, the Revere Journal, to announce on the front page that the
commemoration is “probably the most important anniversary observation that the people of
Revere have ever been interested in.” She was good at promoting herself as well. The Revere
Journal would later claim she showed “glowing zeal and great executive ability. She aims to
make the church a centre from which all good things radiate” (4 Feb. 1911).
She also showed a talent for stretching the truth, a useful tool in public relations. She claimed
that in her first year as minister fifty new members had joined the congregation, and in 1916,
when things were even worse, that nineteen more had. But church records show throughout her
pastorate a decrease, not an increase numbers. Not surprisingly, her fundraising efforts fell well
below what she had hoped. Not only was she not able to pay off the building loan to the
A.U.A., but she also had difficulty raising money for the maintenance of the building. The
meeting house suffered, perennially it seemed, from a leaking roof.
By 1916, when Leggett reached the age of sixty and the church in extremis, Cornish
suggested she retire and apply for financial assistance from a Unitarian relief fund. She
responded plaintively in a letter, “O, but it is not relief that I want, but salvation from my fear of
do-nothing-ism.” In a strained conceit that mixed metaphors from medicine and music, she
added, “I fear I should be stricken with ‘Infantile Paralysis,’ (second childhood) if I permitted
myself to believe that I must be laid upon the shelf—however tenderly, in this my vigorous
prime, with every power attuned (by much discordant tightening of the life-harp) to the minor
chords of my faith. Would it not be the waste of the wisdom of experience? O, but I know only
too well that far wiser and nobler ministers than I have been thus doomed” (A.U.A. Archives 10
Oct. 1916).
With a heavy heart, Leggett resigned her ministry on January 1, 1917, and the church, with
the future of the meeting house in limbo, dissolved not long afterwards. In October 1919,.
 18

Harold L. Pickett, a Unitarian minister in Woburn, made an on-site evaluation in Revere for the
A.U.A. regarding the possibility of reviving the Unitarian church. The A.U.A. apparently
believed it might somehow still come into possession of the meeting house, though a transfer of
title that had taken place a few months earlier would seem to have closed the door to that
possibility. Pickett reported in a hastily written note to the A.U.A., that though the meeting
house was purportedly the second oldest Unitarian church building in America, the future of
Unitarianism in Revere looked hopeless. “The Society greatly depleted by deaths, and by the
young people moving away. 30 or forty members remaining. Neighborhood changing its
population; Jews coming in by the hundreds. Not much hope of reviving interest or adding to
Unitarian membership sufficiently to warrant settlement of a minister.” He went on to point out,
“Some members of the [Unitarian] parish thought of using funds for a scholarship for some
deserving student. Others thought of putting of it in the hands of A.U.A. in trust. At present it is
accumulating against a time ‘when they see what turns up’ ” (A.U.A. Archives 3 Oct. 1919). In
1923, Miss Susan L. Pierce of Revere had complained to the A.U.A. of the lack of
accountability of the money from the sale of the meeting house. N.E. Field, the Secretary of the
A.U.A., in a reply to Miss Pierce wrote, “Dr. Eliot and I have gone over the conditions in Revere
and we both share with you a considerable degree of uneasiness with reference to the parish
funds” (A.U.A. Archives 6 Dec. 1923). What eventually “turned up,” about twenty years after
the sale of the meeting house, was that the bulk of the money from the sale of the meeting house
was turned over not to a deserving student or a deserving Unitarian but to a Mason, Benjamin
Shurtleff, for the publication of his history of Revere.
Unitarianism may have been dead in Revere, but Leggett was not, and where there was life
there was, for someone who believed in “onward-and-upward forever,” hope. At the very least,
she managed to end her spinsterhood. In 1923, at the age of sixty-nine, she married the
seventy-five-year-old. George Willis Cooke (1848-1923), a Unitarian minister and the author of
a history of Unitarianism. They made their home in Revere, but whatever security she they
might have experienced was short-lived. for he died a week after the wedding. She died herself
fifteen years later, in 1938, in a nursing home at the age of eighty-one, on the shelf she had so
much dreaded.

IX: Meeting House, Masons, and the Revering of America

Masonry may not be a religion, as Masons insist, but it is a religious organization, based on
the belief in a Supreme Being, or Master Architect. The aim of Masonry is, according to one
authority, “To enlighten the mind, arouse the conscience, stimulate the noble and generous
impulses of the human heart. It seeks to promote the best type of manhood based upon the
practice of Brotherly Love and the Golden Rule” (Voorhis 1979, 69).
The recently formed Seaview [Masonic] Lodge of Revere had voted (2 July 1919) to accept
the recommendation of its building committee and purchase the meeting house. At the annual
meeting of the Revere Unitarian Society (5 Aug. 1919)—this was after the Unitarian Church had
dissolved—a majority of its members voted to sell the meeting house and land to the Revere
Masonic Association for $7,000, a sum that was less than half the value the town assessor had
placed upon the building. That assessment had been made before the inflationary war years, so
the post-war value was probably higher. When the transaction was formally concluded (21 Aug.
1919), Walter A. Janvrin represented the Unitarian Society and Arthur B. Curtis, treasurer of the
Seaview Lodge, represented the Revere Masonic Association. Although he was kind and
 19

generous toward Leggett, Janvrin appears to have been involved in a conflict of interest since, in
addition to being an important member of the Unitarian church, he was also a brother in the Star
of Bethlehem Lodge, in Chelsea, and an honorary member of the Seaview Lodge. The Masons
paid only $2,000 down for the meeting house, taking out a mortgage for the remaining $5,000
with a Revere bank. The A.U.A. would later privately question the propriety of the sale of the
meeting house to the Masons, and express concern over who had control of the $7,000 and the
accruing interest..
Because the Masons were a somewhat secretive organization, details about the history of the
Seaview Lodge, including architectural changes they made, are hard to come by. Masons believe
in architecture, but they also believe that the history of each lodge is ultimately their secret. As
with Masonic lodges generally, the Seaview Lodge limited membership to men, who would
have had little use for the ladies’ parlor and the stage where the Unitarian ladies had presented
historical tableaux to the public. The Masonic Ritual of Building emphasized the need for privacy
and isolation and called for surrounding high walls, hidden rooms and closets, which may or may
not have been present in the Masonic renovated meeting house. In Masonic Temples:
Freemasonry, Ritual Architecture, and Masculine Archetypes, William D. Moore pointed out
that when a Masonic group could not build a new temple or lodge, they acquired local buildings
and converted them by reconfiguring their interiors. Churches were among the buildings they
acquired for conversion[ CITATION Moo06 \p 129 \l 1033 ]. Between July 2, when they took
title to the meeting house, and October 3, 1919, the date of the first meeting of the Seaview
Lodge, the interior of the building presumably underwent at least some changes to meet the
special needs of the Masonic ceremonies and rituals.
“Many changes and renovations have been made in our historic Temple since its
acquisition,” Shurtleff wrote in “The Old Town Meetinghouse,” a pamphlet published in 1939
on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Masons’ acquisition of the meeting house,
but what those many changes were Shurtleff did not reveal. In his History of Revere, he pointed
out that the meeting house was sold “at a very low figure with the understanding that the
Unitarian Society should hold services there free of charge, and, also, have other
privileges”[ CITATION Shu39 \p 436 \t \l 1033 ]. But the understanding Shurtleff alluded to
must have been an informal one, without legal basis, for there is no mention of it in the deed, and
there is no evidence the few Unitarians remaining in Revere made use of the building after the
Masons purchased it. Any “hidden rooms and closets” they might have added could help create
the isolation and secrecy appropriate for Masonic rituals and ceremonies, but not for Unitarian
baptisms, weddings, and funerals. When William T. Janvrin died in 1919, his funeral was held
in the meeting house, or Revere Masonic Temple as it was referred to in the Revere Journal,
which reported “It was strictly a Masonic funeral,” although Leggett gave the eulogy (13 Dec.
18, p. 5).
The architectural changes in the meeting house in its Masonic phase remain a mystery. In
Masonic lodges, there were many degrees, or steps, in their hierarchical organization. But just
how hierarchicalism might have affected the architecture of the interior of the Seaview Lodge is
unknown. But hierarchy may not have been the only Masonic characteristic that needed to be
accommodated architecturally. Moore claims Masonic lodges at the beginning of the twentieth
century were trying to encourage four modes of masculinity in its members, and four different
kinds of rooms were devoted to those four modes. If Moore was right, Masons believed
architecture was tied to masculinity, as they believed it was to so many things. But, again, we
don’t know to what degree, if at all, the Seaview Lodge might have been engaged in
 20

encouraging any variety of masculinity among its members. The peculiar architecture that
might have been associated with those modes of masculinity efforts, if it ever existed, has
disappeared down the stream of time. But if Moore is right, if the Seaview Lodge encouraged
masculinity, what are we to make of the odd fact, known to several generations of Revere
residents, that Benjamin Shurtleff, the descendant of an old Boston family, the author of the
History of Revere, and a proud member of the Seaview Lodge, was a pedophile?
The publication of Shurtleff’s History of the Town of Revere, the Seaview Lodge’s earlier
acquisition of the historic meeting house, and the still earlier renaming of the town, in 1871,
after Paul Revere—were attempts by Masons to call attention to what they saw as the great but
under-appreciated and sometimes maligned Masonic heritage. Longfellow’s Paul Revere, and the
steeple—“One if by land, two if by sea”— became enduring icons of the myth of New England
and, by extension, of America, as in the painting by Grant Wood. Not only Paul Revere, but
fifty-two of the fifty-seven signers of the Declaration of Independence, including. John Adams,
John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, as well as George Washington, had been Masons. So was.
Horatio Alger, Sr., the sixth permanent minister in the meeting house.

Paul Revere’s Ride by Grant Wood

The town of Revere, when it had been combined with Chelsea, had been a Masonic
stronghold. But an anti-Masonic movement sprang up in the United States in 1826 after the
Masons were accused of murdering a member who threatened to reveal their secrets. Growth of
the organization under those circumstances was very difficult. In Massachusetts, no new lodges were
 21

formed between 1827 and 1843. The Masonic drought in Massachusetts came to end in 1843 with the
founding of the Star of Bethlehem Lodge, in Chelsea. Four other Masonic lodges were later established
in Chelsea, for a total of five, an extraordinary number for a town its size. Rev. Alger was still serving in
the meeting house in 1843, when the Star of Bethlehem Lodge was founded, so he might have been a
member. After he left the meeting house, in 1844, Alger served many years as chaplain of the Masonic
lodge in South Natick, and one year he was the state-wide Grand Chaplain. In keeping with the Masonic
tradition of secrecy, Alger’s membership in the Masons went unpublicized until his death, in 1881, when,
according to the Natick Bulletin (11 Nov. 1881), .he was buried in South Natick with full Masonic rites
and with the Masonic emblem carved on his gravestone.
The Masons had not only reconverted the meeting house to a Masonic temple, they had also been
responsible for the design of the new Revere town hall, built in 1899. In “The Revere Town Hall: The
Architecture of Americanism,” I tried to show that the design of the Revere town hall, fostered by the
Masons, was intended to instill in the burgeoning immigrant population a pride in America and the
Masonic Midnight Rider, whom Longfellow had made into a Prometheus, the fire-giver of American
civilization [ CITATION For901 \t \l 1033 ].

X: The Meeting House as Counseling Center

Meeting house during conversion to Counseling Center, c. 1985

By 1980, the meeting house was seldom used by the Seaview Lodge, which decided to sell
the building. Several lawyers with offices in the neighborhood expressed an interest because they
were rumored to want to raze the building and use the land as a parking lot. Patricia Moccia, an
administrator at the Revere Community Counseling Center (RCCC), told me that the Masons
preferred selling the building to someone who would respect its historical significance. Since the
 22

RCCC was looking for a new home, a lodge member alerted Moccia that the meeting house was
on the market. The RCCC had started out in a garage in the back of St. Anthony’s Church, in
Revere, but conditions in the garage were unsatisfactory. Psychiatry was not in the attic of the
church but in the garage. The RCCC moved from St. Anthony’s to the basement of a small
Methodist church, on Beach Street, not far from the meeting house. From the garage to the
basement was a bit of an improvement, but the Methodists were concerned about the risks, and
perhaps felt the stigma as well, of having mentally troubled people in their basement. When a
new minister arrived, he told Moccia the RCCC would have to leave.
The RCCC wanted to buy the meeting house but could not raise the money. Then an angel,
the kind that finance Broadway musicals, stepped in. He was a private investor who, around
1980, for tax purposes, purchased the meeting house from the Masons for $100,000. (This was
the same building the Masons had bought from the Unitarians for $7,000 in 1919.) The angel
agreed to lease the building to the RCCC, which undertook a major renovation. When the first
phase of the renovation was completed, and the Counseling Center had moved in, I visited the
meeting house on a cold March morning in 1985 to talk to Moccia in her first floor office. The
doctor in charge of the Counseling Center in 1985, a controversial psychopharmacologist, was
not on the premises. He was in hot water with state and federal agencies for “overprescribing”
and for having an affair with a patient. Moccia told me the RCCC was “house poor,” and I told
her a lack of money had been a chronic problem for the ministers of the meeting house for two
hundred years, so the more things change, the more they stay the same. She spoke of wanting to
have what was called a Las Vegas Night to raise money for the Center, but the city council had
rejected her proposal, feeling too many organizations in the city were having Las Vegas Nights.
The council did not want to kill the goose that was laying the golden eggs.
Gambling had not begun in Boston or Revere with the arrival of immigrants. Even as sober
a judge and somber a Puritan as Samuel Sewall had a weakness for lotteries and wagering as
well as an occasional cup of wine or brandy. For him, wagering and drinking did not deserve
the same degree of moral disapproval that dancing, fornicating, and wearing wigs did. In having
a moral blind spot, Sewall was not unique among Puritans. An entry in church records, during
the pastorate of Payson Phillips, show an expenditure of 29 pounds for “Drink to incourage ye
people to bid.” The bidding was to take place at an auction for pews, which included several
new pews whose construction had been made possible by the removal of benches in the back that
previously accommodated poorer, pewless females [ CITATION Cha08 \p "2: 302-303" \l
1033 ]. So Puritans in the late eighteenth century, to raise money for the meeting house, had
their version of a Las Vegas Night, which they called a “Vendoe” and for which they spent 29
pounds for alcohol to uninhibit bidders. The drinks presumably were on the house.
After talking to Moccia in her office on the first floor on that March morning, she gave me a
tour of the three floors of the building. The ground floor had new wall-to-wall carpeting as well
as handsome new $200 dollar chairs in the waiting room. She said one of the chairs had recently
been stolen. There were small consultation rooms on the second floor on the Counseling Center,
with small peek-through glass windows, which I thought of as the confessionals of the Age of
Analysis, where patients were trying to save not their souls but their sanity. In the first half of
the twentieth century, the magic cure was psychiatry, and especially psychoanalysis, the so-
called “talking cure,” but in the second half of the century, with advances in chemistry, the
magic cure was psychotropic drugs, which act on the mind. The talking cure had become
supplemented and to some extent overshadowed by psychopharmacology, which is the study of
 23

the treatment of psychiatric disorders with drugs. Once seen as a miracle, drugs now, of course,
are seen by some as the nation’s ruination.
Moccia told me something interesting in connection with the changing architecture of the
meeting house. On those occasions when a patient became violent, when drugs or talking were
not effective, that patient could be sraitjacketed, taken to the rear exit, put in an ambulance, and
rushed to a hospital in Boston. The purpose was to spare other patients being exposed to
psychotic behavior. A rear exit for psychotics reminded me of all those entrances in the original
meeting house, which had separated the congregation on the basis of race and gender as the
pews inside had separated them further on the basis of class. In the RCCC, the important
distinction was not between the saved and the damned, as in Calvinist times, but between
psychotics and what used to be called neurotics. As the town’s WASPS were replaced in the late
nineteenth century by Irish and Italians, and in the late twentieth century by Spanish-speaking
and South East Asian immigrants, mental illness had replaced sin as the great stigma. In 1985,
most of the Counseling Center’s patients happened to be Italian-Americans, then the largest
ethnic group in the city. An Italian-American herself, Moccia was aware of the prejudice against
mental illness by her compatriots. If the Counseling Center had had a side door through which
stigmatized patients could have entered unobserved, that might have made things easier for
them, and their embarrassed relatives. But such a side door would have architecturally
underscored the discrimination against them, as those entrances in the original meeting house
had the discrimination against women and blacks.
In the 1980s, the city’s most recent immigrants, the Cambodians, had settled in a
neighborhood near the beach, not far from the Counseling Center. It might as well have been in
another country, because they did wanted nothing to do it with it. “They take care of their own,”
Moccia explained, as earlier waves of immigrants had done. Mental illness was a shame each
ethnic group, like each family, tried to deal with as best they could, which too often meant
denying or hiding the problem by keeping the unfortunate family member in the attic,
figuratively, if not literally.
In my 1985 visit, the cavernous top floor of the meeting house was still in the early stages of
renovation.. “I want them to save that,” Moccia told me, looking up at the high ceiling, which
probably dated from the 1887 renovation. It is unlikely anything remains of the 1710 meeting
house except the huge oak frame, a part of which, on the third floor, I could see and put my hand
on. The 1985 renovation was done by Michael Bartolo, Jr., a contractor with an office in East
Boston, in Maverick Square. When I visited him, also in March 1985, he told me that the oak
frame was as strong as ever. He gave me a copy of a letter, from Virginia Fitch, of the
Massachusetts Historical Commission, dated June 15, 1983: “Pursuant to your recent request, I
reiterate that the Massachusetts Historical Commission staff feel that the Revere Masonic
Temple (First Church of Christ) appears eligible for individual listing on the National Register of
Historic Places. Built in 1710, its significance lies in the fact that it is the earliest surviving frame
church in Suffolk County and certainly one of the earliest in the Commonwealth. In addition,
both the 1856 and 1887 renovations were important as stylish exponents of the design of their
day. Despite alterations to the building, the survival of original framing timbers in the roof area
and the retention of its basic 19th century form and massing constitute an important architectural
unit.”
In June 2000, I had occasion to visit the Counseling Center again, on a sunny day when the
building was being painted by a crew of Middle Easterners who were speaking a strange
language as they worked, listening to exotic music, maybe from a tape player. Inside the
 24

building, the young woman behind the receptionist counter was a Southeast Asian, probably
Cambodian. Most of the Southeast Asians in the reception area milled around, looking uneasy or
puzzled, or just sat impassively. Signs on the wall were in English and what I presumed was
Cambodian. Moccia’s observation fifteen years earlier that the Cambodians avoided the
Counseling Center was obviously no longer the case. As Puritans had come to the meeting house
early in the eighteenth century, seeking salvation, the Southeast Asians had come two hundred
years later seeking counseling or medicine. In Puritan times, the minister was the medicine
man; nearly three centuries later, the psychopharmacologist was.
The meeting house speaks of conflict and division, as well as of community and continuity,
of free thinking as well as faith. If fire or lawyers looking for parking spaces do not destroy it,
the oak frame may survive another three hundred years, serving as the backbone of public
buildings whose architecture will change as needs and styles change. On its three hundredth
birthday, the meeting house is not dead and mummified. It is alive and well. If the meeting
house at no time has been beautiful, it has always been functional, a thing of everyday use. It
has also been, for me at least, a revelation, for architecture may be the essence of history.

Meeting House (Revere Community Counseling Center), 2008

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