 It's a delight to have everyone working their way in and thank you for braving the rainy night, which is not an unusual event in Vermont these days. My name is Sandal Kate and I'm here in a semi-official capacity as the president of the East Montoya Historical Society. And back in, I'm going to say late winter, art through a growing manner of met. And I knew that this church was having a big celebration this month. And with the callous Historical Society and ourselves, we thought it would be wonderful to learn more about the indigenous peoples' building. And someone was typing very quickly on this computer or whatever it was using to write the story that we're going to hear tonight. So we were able to just wonderfully expand this gathering tonight to include all of you folks. And I think that there's going to be eventually a reporting of this evening's talk. And I'm not sure how that will be broadcast, but if you keep your ears around, perhaps you'll find out. So don't have a whole lot else to say. This is not where I go on Sundays. But I've been participating a little bit with the history committee from this church to put on an exhibit that's just gotten displayed in the parish house. And David Sheets is a good person, perhaps. I don't know if Sally Smith put this play because she does it with. Okay, she's with. Anyway, but I'm going to let you know, and perhaps you'll hear this again, that the exhibit for the month of October is that of Prince of Original Painters by James Franklin Gilman, who was the lieutenant painter back in the late 1800s. And he created just these ideal, exquisite images of many homes and towns and other buildings in central Vermont back then. And that's a really good story. On October 1st, which is the first Sunday of the four Sundays in October, the parish house will be open from 1 o'clock until 4 o'clock for folks to stop by, hopefully during some remnant, holy season, to receive the Prince. On October 1st, from about 1 o'clock until 2 o'clock, we have invited a number of folks who live on or near the various location premises of some of Gilman's work to just tell maybe a little bit about how the history of the place has evolved since Mr. Gilman was there. So, hopefully you'll have a chance to see that work on Sunday afternoon. Now, do you have Barbara? I'm sorry? Where each picture was done. Okay, so Barbara Luth has just augmented that by saying that there's actually a map that matches the locations of the various buildings and farms. And I'll tell you that the Humphrey Elementary School does a wonderful program with their third and fourth graders teaching them about their community. And they learned about Mr. Gilman. Not just, I'm kind of getting his off the path, but, and one of them said, oh, so he was like, well, I don't know, I want you to talk to me. And I said, good for you. And they also have done a school tour along this idea of doing a self tour, self-adventure. So anyway, to get you back to this building, I'm very delighted that Tom Schmidt and his work, which Gilman and I will have tonight, tells a wonderful story of a strong building that can split us 200 years later from the time it was built. So maybe on our cool rainy night, maybe you'll warm welcome to author Tom Schmidt. I'll try to make eye contact there in the middle. Thank you, Sandal. A couple of housekeeping items before I begin. Still not coming through. Got to get this up closer, closer, closer. All right. I almost have to swallow it. All right. A couple of housekeeping items before I begin. One is there are restrooms down the hall in the parish hall. You go in there, turn right, make another right, and there's one little restroom there. And if you time it just right, I won't think I said something to insult you when you leave. Or you can work it out if I do. That would be a time to use the restroom. The other is that we do have copies of the book available. It's called Presence in the Center, a Bicentennial History of the Old Meeting House with kind of a cool drone photograph from above on the cover. And these are available. It's $25 cash or check. That barely covers the cost of printing. There's nothing in it for me, I promise. If I'm going to get rich and famous, it's not going to be from this book. But we hope you enjoy it. And my wife, Mary, will be available afterwards at a little table here to take your money and give you a book. They're all signed. If that makes them worth less or more, I'm not sure. Sandal asked me to say a little about who I am and how the project got started. I'd rather keep that to a minimum and talk more about the building and its history. But many, many years ago, I did a PhD in humanities and taught for 30-some years, wrote a dozen books in different genres. And more recently, my primary interest has been in poetry. But one day in January, we were having a formation meeting talking as a committee about what kinds of things we might do for the Bicentennial. And dear David Sheets suggested somebody ought to write a history of the church. And I just blithely said, well, I think I could do that. Well, I was thinking maybe 75, 80 pages. And it's now 250 pages with dozens of photographs and 75 sources quoted and all these end notes. And once you get started, it just becomes this tar baby and pulls you in. But for me, it was very enjoyable because it allowed me to kind of rebuild some long atrophied research muscles and look at all kinds of different sources, some that were provided to me by others. For example, Nathan Phillips, known to many of you, was a wonderful sleuth who provided a lot of newspaper articles and made a couple of incredible finds in the Vermont Historical Society Library. Barb Plouf, as a member of the old meeting house, has been keeping archives for decades and was an incredible source of help and information. And I can't neglect to mention my own wife, Mary, who is not only a superb editor and proofreader, but she really excused me from most or all household duties for months, provided tea and snacks in my basement cubby hole, and in fact, locked me down there for days at a time and just dropped little bits of food down the laundry chute because I had self-imposed deadlines to get this done. And in fact, the copies came from the printer on Monday and we had our bicentennial celebration yesterday. So, yeah, it was a little bit of a close call. And it depended on the efforts of a lot of people besides me, obviously. Well, many of you were present yesterday for that celebration and I expect that some of you will learn what you want to learn by reading the book. Others of you are new to the area or to the history of the area. And then there's some of you who know far more than I know about certain aspects of local history, especially those that don't necessarily pertain directly to the church's development. So my intention tonight is simply to highlight some of the more unusual discoveries of my research and to do this in chronological order, telling stories rather than lecturing and pausing between tales for your questions and comments before moving on. I've chosen seven stories. They vary in length and if we don't have time for all of them, then I'll just let you go and I'll just keep talking or arrange for another meeting. We'll figure it out somehow or I'll just talk faster. The first I've given the not very creative title, 1820 and the Grove in the Center. The history of the old meeting house really begins in 1787 when a 21-year-old young man walked barefoot, as far as we know, 200 miles from Massachusetts with his uncle and his brothers, maybe one or two pack horses to survey the 40 square miles of newly charted Montpelier. Many of you know his name was Parley Davis. He picked this spot right around this building, the geographic middle of the area, and therefore it has been called the center ever since. That's why. There were no roads here. It was all trees. Vermont was 99% trees. The 1% were ponds and rivers. Everything else was trees and they were huge. If it was light enough and you looked out the window, you'd see some 50 or 60-foot trees out here. They were two and three times that height then. So even seeing where you were had to be an incredible challenge. No roads, no paths. He just showed up here and he liked this spot because there were big trees that were widely spaced and he decided this will be my home and this will be the town or city of Montpelier. Wrong, but that was his intention. This road outside, incidentally, eventually became a road from the trail that went down to the river and back and it ended up going all the way to Canada. It wasn't paved until the 1960s, but what you drove up on to come into the parking lot of the church was the equivalent in the 1780s of the interstate 91. This was how you got from that little village that was forming down by the river to Canada. And you're on the main route. Again, didn't turn out that way as it was originally envisioned. Well, the next part of this interesting aspect of the story occurs in 1796 when a new religious group called the Methodists began sending missionaries into the wilds of Vermont. They had been in the more settled areas of New England and in the south where they'd become well established, but they decided to come here and they sent a giant of a man named Jesse Lee who showed up in Barrie and preached and made his first converts in Barrie. The converts were grouped in what were called classes and when they got enough classes together they would have enough people to form a church. Well, we don't know exactly who or when or where, but at some point in the next 10 to 15 years there were enough classes within a couple of miles of where we're sitting or standing here that there were 100 Methodists in this area and it was time to take the next step. This group of classes of Methodists were rewarded by the denomination with an annual regional conference that took place somewhere around here and I'll come back to that and the content of that conference in a little bit but the interesting question at this point is just where was it that they met? One of them, Henry Nut, who lived in the nut house and the nut farm down at the end of Bliss Road decades later told a local historian that they met in the Grove in the center. Now that particular phrase makes it sound like it was something established and familiar to people at the time. Where was it? We know that wherever this group of Methodists met they would choose a central location where they could all gather from the farms in the area. We know they would need to meet near a road where they could all see where the others were. They couldn't just go off in the woods somewhere. We know that it would be very convenient for them to have their meetings near a large barn where they could meet during inclement weather, of which we have a lot. This spot checked all those boxes. The barn would have been Parley Davis' barn across the street. He built a large house which still stands and I think most of you are familiar with that just across the street and there was a large barn that's no longer there. Davis, we have a couple of other hints about where this location may have been too because Davis and some other neighbors decided that they would make this area around here the eventual town and so they set aside four acres, half on Davis' property and half on the neighbor's property to be the ultimate town center. And of course they left the trees here because the trees would be useful to build the buildings. Everywhere else, they cut the trees down. All of them. By 1870, Vermont was 15% tree cover and most of that was in the Northeast Kingdom. It's now back to 85%. So what you see around here with all these trees in Little Woods is really growth from the middle of the 20th century and at the end of the 18th century they just mowed it all down and they burned the big hardwood trees for potash which was a cottage industry in the early decades of the 19th century and a lot of people made more money selling potash than they did farming and so they just cut all the trees down. Well, we have another hint about where the location might have been of this group of people because we know that I mentioned that there were trees around here and I mentioned the size of them. Some of these trees were pine trees in a grove that were probably about 150 feet tall. How do we know that? Because you're sitting on them. If you look down or behind you these are single plank pewbacks and single plank pew bottoms and to get something that big you had to have trees that tall. We can also go up in the rafters and see what was hewn and milled to form the skeleton of the building and they were enormous pines. Their little hardwood was used here and of course because they built all of this in the winter and spring they couldn't just haul the trees up from a lumber yard somewhere they had to do it all here and it would have been very difficult especially in the muddy part of the year but I'll get back to that. There's one more hint about where this group of people met for 20 or so years before the church was built and that's under the floor. If I move, I'll carry the mic with me if I move over here right underneath where I'm standing you see when you walk up to the church a nice rock ledge all the way around it looks pretty level and you'd imagine it's all just dirt underneath but underneath where I'm standing is about 100 square feet of ledge protruding from the ground gently sloping down toward the road and right where I am now is a rocky outcropping that forms a natural pulpit or a place to stand or to stand behind so this would have been ringed by big trees and it would have been open to the road a natural amphitheater basically an outdoor church before there was ever an indoor church so it's not absolutely certain but it's highly likely that you're standing on the spot that around 1805, 1810 somewhere in there the original evangelistic meetings took place in the trees to form the Methodist society which ended up forming the church so that's story number one before I go on have I inspired any questions about any of those aspects of the story I've said everything I guess yes, yes probably but as far as I know we've looked at the lumber here and definitely pine and I mean you can obviously see the pine planks and pine floorboards maybe some spruce in the rafters I haven't investigated in that much detail it's kind of fun to crawl around up there and I'll tell you a little later about the steeple that's interesting too story number two or a series of link stories 1822 an uneasy alliance and for a lot of this I'm very indebted to Nathan Phillips because he was nosing around in Berry in the library and he found a book by a woman named Sophie Damon written in 1887 called Old New England Days sounds like kind of a standard Victorian story turns out Sophie Damon was Parley Davis's granddaughter and this book although it's ostensibly a novel is not a novel at all it's a memoir all she did was change the name Davis to Allwood and told the story of her mother Ruth and her aunt Hannah growing up right here in the 1810s and 1820s it's all about this time period and this place one of the most interesting stories that I didn't include in the book because it's not directly related to the church but it is related to this story September 4th 1814 little Ruth Davis father Parley was off with the Montpelier area militia in an attempt to drive the British out of New York Ruth was playing in the road she says in the clearing essentially describing about this spot she was playing with a couple of girlfriends and she heard military music and she looked up the road and she saw soldiers coming up over the hill just past Fred Strong's house and she went screaming back to the house saying mommy the British are coming the British are coming and her mother knew better and came out and was met by the leader of the regiment of the second main militia who had walked all the way here and they were on their way to the battle of Plattsburgh well they were hungry and here was one big house there were 500 of them she emptied the larders they spent the day here they drank all the cider from the casks from the orchard that was over there and then they went on their way I was interested in particular in the cider detail because I live right up there on one edge of what was Parley Davis' property and there are a few volunteer apple trees up there still one very very old one died just two years ago and I was a little excited about it dying so I could cut it and count the rings well alas it was rotten in the middle so I don't know but I believe deep in my heart Parley Davis' apple trees that produced the cider that the main militia drank on their way to the battle of Plattsburgh and if you know your history you know they got there too late I said it was September 11th when they scared Ruth and marched down the road here the battle was actually no that was September 14th the battle was September 11th so they missed it by three days but Parley Davis and the local militia made it in time and in fact suffered several casualties before they came home I don't know what happened to the main militia if they came back this way or not maybe they figured they ate and drank them out of the house and home so maybe they should go over to the 91 and go up across on the 2 I don't know the story moves ahead a few years to 1818 and a sad chapter but a very important one in the history of this place because that's when Ruth's older sister Asenath died of some lingering disease we're not sure what and the Reverend Chester Wright who was the only local minister was asked to come up from the village down by the river to conduct the funeral Parley and Rebecca Davis did not want the Reverend Chester Wright to conduct the funeral but he was the only clergyman in the area he was the pastor of the Puritan Calvinist congregational church the only place in town with a permanent pastor there were two other groups the Methodists of course in 1818 hadn't formed this church yet but they were here and their pastor was itinerant he traveled all around central Vermont likewise the Universalists that's where Parley and Rebecca Davis's loyalties were but those ministers were out of town that's where this is where the plot thickens the Universalists were not like today's Unitarian Universalists whose motto is free and responsible search for truth and meaning a very rational approach to the spiritual life at the time Universalists when they were founded were very Orthodox conservative Protestants belief in Jesus, salvation, the miraculous with one exception they rejected the doctrine of hell they believed that salvation was universally available hence the name and that God would use even a period of time in the afterlife in hell to turn people toward his love that's where the idea of universalism came from well that was rejected by the Methodists and the Calvinists and in fact when Jester Wright came up here to preach his sermon he consigned Assenath Davis to hell in his funeral oration because she was not a Calvinist congregational and congregationalist and therefore not one of the elect you can imagine how this went over with the family and the locals and Sophie Damon includes this very touching account of that night when Lil Ruth was trembling and crying in bed imagining her poor sister in the fires of hell and her mother came in to comfort her and explained we do not believe the things that those people believe and she went on basically to explain universalist doctrine to her daughter and it's there in Sophie Damon's memoir and then the next day in the newspaper appeared an obituary explaining that Assenath Davis loved Jesus was saved by Jesus went to heaven to be with Jesus and her last words were Jesus come quickly so there Reverend Wright there's no name on that obituary but I'm guessing Rebecca Davis part of what's interesting about that is it shows what fierce competition there was between the different religious sects at the time some of them actually came to physical blows and went to each other's meetings and tried to pick fights the universalists and the methodists and the congregationalists were the three main groups here who were vying for converts and for the loyalty of the locals the methodists won to put it plainly the universalists were very popular in the area they were a main force behind the old brick church in the east village the old west church the north Montpelier church were really caught on here Parley Davis tried he actually paid for the universalist minister to come here and preach from time to time in spite of the fact that the methodists had the church the methodists published in their own documents don't have anything to do with the universalists and the universalists didn't have anything to do with them and of course the Calvinists consigned them all to hell so it was not a big kumbaya moment of ecumenism in the late 18th century and I'll get back to that later but things are very tame now compared to the way they were then in 1820 when the methodists were invited to have this big powwow and camp meeting right here where we sit their speaker, their keynote speaker was the Reverend William Fisk Wilbur Fisk, I'm sorry you may have heard the name of Wilbur Fisk's friends maybe thinking of the Civil War Diarist have you heard of that Wilbur Fisk he was named after the Wilbur Fisk I'm talking about but they were no relation that was a school teacher the name was coincidence I actually just learned that today because I was wondering was he his son or his grandson no the Wilbur Fisk who preached here in the Grove at the center was the leading intellectual he became the first president of Wesleyan University he was influential in the legislature here he was a leader in a temperance movement and he was an integral part of the abolitionist movement in the early decades of the 19th century before it was fashionable nationwide the methodists spearheaded abolitionism in Vermont and in New England the sermon title that day in 1820 in that camp meeting by Wilbur Fisk was Endless Misery now of course you're chuckling because it sounds like a hellfire and brimstone sermon but in fact it was not a denunciation of the heathen and the lost it was a denunciation of the universalists because if you die without being saved you experience endless misery not temporary misery until you get your act together in the afterlife and turn to Jesus and everybody needed to understand that what's interesting about that and you may be a step ahead of me is that he was preaching on land owned by the leading universalist in the area Parley Davis on land that Parley Davis would end up leasing to those methodists to build this church and send his own kids there to listen to Methodist doctrine and finance and become the primary financier of the church two-thirds of the pews that you're sitting in in order to build the church why would he do that? because he wanted a town and in order to have a town you've got to have a church and the only people who had the money in the interest in building a church were his neighbors the Methodist so they got the church but what's interesting is when you read the lease and the agreement to build the church and the Miller Plate information about who's going to build the church and what it's going to look like the document says that other religious groups can use the building when the Methodists aren't using it that was the compromise it's there in the contract and it's there in the land lease again it wasn't a kumbaya moment of oh we all just believe in one God no it was Parley Davis making a compromise today you guys get the building but it's my land I'm building the church and they're going to be universalists in here too when you're done and they're going to be congregationalists including Chester Wright who's going to come up here and consign us all to hell and that's the way to do it because he was a very broad minded person that way and he and Rebecca told their daughters to come over here and Rebecca became devout Methodists and they married the brothers Pitkin and became very important citizens here Pitkin I'll mention again later became a general in the Civil War effort to provide materials for the troops very influential group of people and they too were Methodists in fact they sat in this pew right here where Carol with them is sitting and that was the one pew they kept he sold all the rest but the family sat there I doubt if Rebecca and Parley came here very often except when the universalists were here but their daughters sat there that was the family pew I also would mention the book is available you can actually get it online Sophie Damon's book Old New England Days it's also in the Vermont Historical Library and I don't have time to detail this but there's a very moving tribute to her mother and her aunt and the religious differences that were the dispute was in a context of great love in the family so they had their differences a universalist and a Methodist in the same household and different outlook on the way God would reveal himself and guide people but they all did it in a very loving way so however disputatious the area was in terms of the religious groups there was one family that we would probably agree got it right in terms of agreeing to disagree in the context of love in one home questions before I go on to a third story there's a lot there oh okay I need to get closer to the mic or how am I doing for others coming through okay or I need to get I need to I get carried away and or would it be better if I just did this that I got a hand free I only need to wave one arm so okay yes good question who else was forming churches the congregationalist had their church downtown the old brick church came next well actually I'm sorry the old west church was just the next year 1823 as many of you know and that my understanding was primarily universalist to begin with and then the old brick church likewise and later you know they all changed north Montpelier came I think in the 1830s I'm not exactly sure and then the Methodist also built a church that's no longer standing downtown near the courthouse in the 1830s or 40s and then Trinity Methodist the big one in 1874 that became the established Methodist church but nothing else around here free will Baptist yes right the free will Baptist were trying and if you've driven around Maine or even northern Vermont you'll see that they established some churches but they never really got a good foothold here although we'll return to that part of the story because in the middle decades of this the last century in the 1950s 60s and 70s this was and the old brick church had Baptist ministers so they never disappeared but they didn't build a church in the area 1822 realizing the vision now we come to the building itself Lovell Kelton a name that many of you know took the commission at least to frame the church in 1822 and he built the old west church a year later we don't know who was on the crew we have a couple of names it would have taken some days when they were raising the frame it would have taken dozens or scores of people but we know almost no names and we don't know who did the finish work or the interior whether it was Lovell or someone else we have his diary and he was doing other things at the time so there had to be a crew he was helping build other barns he and his sons were working with arms and all of this was going on in 1822 it's also a little odd that the the agreement to build the church was made in April 1822 and they finished the framing in August bad timing because they had to start in the mud and they had to work all through the haying season and the normal time to do this would have been late fall through the winter so you can slide the logs they don't sink down into the ground and either to the wheels of the vehicles you're using or the hoofs of the animals you're using so a lot of the heavy construction and lumber processing was done in the winter but they did it in the spring and we don't know why in fact it turned out to be kind of a hurry up and wait situation because they finished framing in 1822 and they presumably put the roof on and then nothing happened they didn't actually finish until late 1825 and dedicate the church in January 1826 January 26th 1826 Lovell Kelton's diary says it was a cold and blustery day that's the only reference we have to the dedication of the church why the coldest day of the year to dedicate the church what happened in between well it's a pretty good guess they ran out of money they did some other subscribing sold some more pews did what they could to raise money in between and this building once it was framed and roofed was probably the workshop where a lot of the finish work was done inside underneath it took three plus years to finish we're looking at the finished product here but the construction itself I think is fascinating first you had to chop down all these enormous trees around here and not stand underneath them while they're falling and then you have to mill them or hue them into shape and if you looked up above this plaster in the ceiling you'd see it's a combination of hand-hewing and actually milling the lumber there was a lumber mill run by this little creek over here a couple hundred yards up the road owned by Parley Davis I believe at the time and it was owned by several people over time and that's where the wood for the church was milled including the wood for all of the windows all of the pews all of the trim everything you see was done on site because Miles and Abashan were not open that day and everything had to be done here everything was done with mortise and tenon there are no nails in this building in fact if you look at the ends of the pews you might see the little pegs where the mortise and tenons were attached to make the pews the only nails in this building are the nails that attach the siding on the outside and if you look carefully on a bright day you'd see that they're square headed they had to be made one by one and forged and the window glass came from elsewhere everything else you see had to be done on site the plaster was mixed and made on site the paint was made from oxidized lead mixed with linseed oil and this is the original plaster there have been several coats of paint on the outside this is the original green although it's been repainted and the trim was the little trim boards here were once dark red but everything else is original and of course the pews have never been painted or stripped or anything this is what they were what they still are how did they build it well they first put down the foundation and then they built the floor and then that whole wall of timbers was all made and fashioned here with mortise and tenon and laid on the floor then this entire wall weighing multiple tons was all assembled in place and laid on top of the back then this wall was all made in place and laid here we know they did it in this order because this side is higher so you would start here you get a group of about 30 to 50 men here they would stand on the edge of the top of that wall and push as high as they could and then another group of men would come behind them with poles shove it up a little further and they probably had oxen over here with rope and tackle to pull it up to vertical so they did the two walls the back wall and then they had this U shape then they would build the front of the church and the steeple what's interesting about the steeple is if you go up you can see a little attic hole there if you just move that attic board out of the way and looked up there with a flashlight you'd see that the lowest part of the steeple is very open great big beams with a big hole in the middle they had no crane so the only way to get the second part and the third part and the cupola was to do a telescope so they built the second part and shoved it up and then they had that all attached and put the third part up there and shoved it up I don't know how they got the copper cupola up at the top because it's welded or soldered together and it must weigh several hundred pounds there were no cranes and I don't think they had helicopters but they had oxen, rope and tackle and they had some pretty fancy leverage systems but no cranes so that creates the shell but now you don't have a roof yet so now comes the dangerous part they've got to put beams all the way across here with temporary supports these posts here support the ceiling but not the roof so once they got up there they'd have a platform and then the really dangerous work began because these are very heavy timbers and they go from the edge all the way to the top and there are multiple supports inside so they've got to figure out how to do all that up in the air and then this is the part that amazes me there's a 55 foot ridge pole that goes along the center and it's pentagon shaped so that the sides of it meet those trusses at angles and the top of it is a nice peak it's got to weigh I don't know four or five tons it's about eight inches at the base how thick in the middle how did they get it up there well, two theories we've toyed around with one is that they put it on end and very carefully rocked it onto the top and then used oxen to pull it over until it was in the right place another option is they put it over on the side and got oxen over on the other side and had them walk that way and slowly pulled it up to the ridge and dropped it in place those things are fascinating to me how they did that because there are no details left behind we know most of it from descriptions of other churches built elsewhere and of course Amish barns which are built in a similar fashion today although they tend to build section by section all the way through rather than wall, wall, wall and then ceiling so fascinating the way they did that once they finished they had no heat these wood stoves are actually fairly modern there was no heat in the building until 1854 when they put the first wood stoves in so when the congregation started there were 150 to 200 people in here every week including about 100 children for services that lasted two or three hours and you must sit still and listen children and there was no heat and that's part of the reason these pews were all enclosed people would come with horse blankets and little heated rocks or portable heaters like a little coal with a tin and they would put it inside their little area and huddle in I was amazed to learn that throughout New England people commonly brought their dogs to church too and these were not chihuahuas so you can imagine the chaos at the beginning of the service when all the dogs were greeting each other you can imagine they were very useful on those winter days to lie on your feet and pastors all over New England complained about the dogs and the food scattered around and the people chewing and spitting tobacco and it was just it was a mess until the Methodists of course cleaned it all up no smoking, no chewing, no drinking, no spitting I don't know how they felt about the dogs but a lot of people the outside is interesting too I'll just say a little about that before going to the next story we're used to seeing white clapboard churches in New England they all look the same if you're coming through here as a tourist this one is a little smaller and it's pretty proportions but is it really that unusual well in fact it is we have to understand that this is a federal style building but this was a revolutionary period of time quite literally this was built just after the American Revolution the idea of separation of church and state was gaining strength and the idea of combining churches with meeting houses was becoming obsolete instead churches were being built to look like churches they were rectangular they had pulpits at one end and they had big steeples with crosses and you entered through the steeple end normally very different from the New England meeting house design that we're familiar with the Old West Church interestingly was built a year later but it's a somewhat earlier design it's larger, it's squareer the pews are square and there are quite a few details that are different about that that we could go into detail on another occasion but I won't today but even though they're a year apart this is a somewhat more progressive design and a little more radical or revolutionary again once it's 200 years old it doesn't seem like that it's hard to imagine what the modern equivalent of something like that might be fourth story which links into this one 1823 to 1826 the mystery of the interior this is an unusual design because the pulpit is on the wrong end every other church you go into in New England you'll walk in the doors and see the pulpit at the other end another unusual feature that you don't see very often and you probably wouldn't know this is the graceful curved balcony and a third which holds up the choir a third feature that's unusual is not only the cove ceiling which makes for terrific acoustics but it's a double cove ceiling when you twist around you'll see that the two coves meet in the corners of the church and that's not easy to do if like me you've ever done any carpentry or home remodeling to try to get two curves to meet perfectly at the end ain't easy and it makes for terrific acoustics even the pews are unusual in design for this period these long straight box pews one per family well all of that's unusual and we wondered are there any churches around that have any of these features well one of our own members who's here tonight Judy Granger had a hunch that maybe this had something to do with Rebecca Davis and her family history back in New Hampshire she told me about this and I thought why would there be any connection well turns out she went down there did a little research and she found out that there's one other church in New England that has a pulpit on the wrong end a double cove ceiling a curved balcony and pine box pews Rebecca Davis's childhood church in Mount Verman, New Hampshire I am here to confess to all in sundry that I thought Judy was on a wild goose chase and her goose laid a golden egg there is no way this could be coincidence and it's a fascinating combination of features and also fascinating if you're a step ahead of me that a woman designed this church in the 1820s no less did she sit down and tell level Kelton it's got to be this way and this way and I'm going to draw it we don't know we know the result we know the connection to her church we don't know anything in between it would be wonderful if we could find a diary or something that would explain it in more detail we do know with a high degree of confidence that it was Rebecca behind all of this the joke of course about the pulpit being on the wrong end is that if you come in late everybody including the pastor has a chance to glare at you you can't sneak into this church I don't know if that explains the low attendance sometimes but we just smile and embrace everyone who comes in whenever they come in right pastor well as I said when I got closer to the end I would need to talk faster leave a couple things out so the the last couple of stories I have are a little quicker but I think you'll find them interesting story number five is the rise and fall of the Methodist the original congregation was 150 to 200 people strong at least a dozen families and attendants fill these pews with at least six children each and you'll know some of the names the morses the temple tins the pecs the cutlers the Cummings the Stevens and as I mentioned before the nuts genealogical research allowed us to come up with quite a few details and I won't do this now but you see the little numbers on the pews these were the original numbers of the pews when people bought them to raise money for the church and then they had the privileges sitting in that pew in the back of the hymnal where you're sitting are biographical details about the family that owned that pew or probably sat there in the 1820's I spent several weeks of my life looking up in detail their genealogies and all their children's names and which ones lived and which ones died so you are now morally obligated at some point to open that pew and look at that there is also a map of the pew with the names of all the people who sat here in 1828 I chose that date because by then the church was finished and their first pastor Reverend Dow was established and that was really the full beginning of the church as a congregation of finished building but it didn't last long Methodist records show that there was a precipitous decline in membership starting about 10 years later to the tune of 15 to 20 people leaving per year until by the 1860's this building was virtually empty and in 1872 the Methodists abandoned it all together and the church which had purchased a house across the street about 100 yards down as a personage was sold for less than half what they paid for it the whole thing was abandoned what happened now the obvious answer is well everybody was moving downtown the city grew up around the river big mistake as we've learned and they knew then that it was prone to flooding but they wanted the water power to run the mills so that's where the town ended up but that wasn't the whole explanation because the churches down there started to grow and this started to shrink at about 20 years apart there are a couple of other possible explanations one is this was a very old group to begin with and they didn't replace themselves they really started before the church was built the leading families and most of the older men and women who led the church died in the 1840's unless the eldest son which of course was all bought up by then unless the eldest son who got the land was also a Methodist they weren't coming here and so they didn't replace themselves a third explanation is that Methodism itself kind of lost its fizz about that time it became a very conservative state establishment church no longer the evangelistic excitement with camp meetings and weekly meetings and mutual accountability and loud singing and polite doesn't recruit very well they complained about it themselves at the time so for a variety of reasons the church languished at that point but it didn't disappear the building was maintained partly by rent from the city of Montpelier and then the city of East Montpelier because from 1828 to 1848 the town paid the church $50 a year for the building for town meetings and then from 1849 to 1890 East Montpelier which was then formed had its town meetings here until they built a building a town hall down in the East Village so that was a primary source of revenue the church was maintained primarily by local farmers who didn't have much money didn't have a lot of wherewithal but they kept it going by inviting preachers to come up from town occasionally to preach I thought this went on for about 100 years that the church was virtually derelict and that's why it was preserved in such pristine condition turns out there was a lot more interest and activity going on here during those years in the early 20th century and onward than we once thought again partly thanks to Nathan Phillips who dug up a lot of interesting newspaper articles we know a lot about the people in the community and their activities here probably the key feature or the key event was in 1914 they started a Sunday school and dozens of kids came from all around to this Sunday school they met primarily in the schoolhouse next door because it was easier to heat and then later they purchased the building that's now the parish house they called it the community hall and Sunday schools met there but of course the parents brought the kids what are they going to do? Stand around at the back and they started talking about well what do we do? Maybe we should have more church meetings and gradually that built up to the point that there were part-time preachers coming from out of town and then they hired part-time preachers to come here on a regular basis or full-time in the summer and then they started talking about maybe making this a full-time church in the 1950s and 60s and that's what happened the formal transition was in 1966 but it really wasn't that abrupt it wasn't going from a corpse to a resurrection it was really going from a very small body to a more formal body where they created bylaws and hired a full-time minister which they shared with the old brick church I'd like to say a little about that at the end but there's one community event that I want to mention I think you'll find interesting before I go there this has been certainly since the middle of the 20th century not just a church but a community center a lot of arts events musical concerts there were four H-club meetings here there were dances they celebrated the end of World War II there were a lot of things that went on here and probably the first and one of the most interesting was on the 7th of May 1861 when the center meeting house was chosen as the site for a patriotic flag raising to honor the union cause in the Civil War there were hundreds of people here they raised what they called a liberty tree 120 feet tall and they unfurled from it a 30 by 12 foot American flag they had local politicians including Addison Peck who grew up sitting in this pew right here and was a local politician and they had Parley Pitkin who lived across the street he was the grandson-in-law of Parley Davis and the general in the local 1st Vermont Brigade they had a big celebration and a bit of church and state mixed and you might wonder why did they do it here why didn't they do it in front of the state house well it could be as simple as the fact that general Parley Pitkin lived across the street it was his idea we don't know he would have been very influential it could be because of visibility the church stands at almost 1100 feet so you go up another 120 feet and you could see that flag for miles much further than you could see from downtown you could see anything although there's a hill back here on Carroll's property that I think is about 1350 so you couldn't see it from downtown but you could see it all the way to I also had to believe everything around 120 foot flag and it could be that they did it here because this is the only place you could find a 120 foot tree everything had been cut down and it takes an enormous tree to set up as a flagpole so maybe that was the reason the Civil War was a very live concern for Vermonters I'm not sure you know but 120 men from East Montpelier served in the Union Army in the Civil War and 27 of them died 22 and a half percent an enormous percentage a dozen men who were part of this church served in the Civil War and one of them died Elphanon Ormsby whose family had moved to the center in the 1830s and in his eulogy it was mentioned that he was one of the boys who raised that flag in 1861 he died in the battle with Wilderness in 1864 last story that I think might interest you and then I'll ask for a couple of questions and I don't want to go test your patience too far beyond 8 o'clock but we did get started about 7.15 so I'm cheating a little here the last story is 1995 and they split with the old brick church I mentioned the group of neighbors drew up articles of constitution they formed this church in 1966 and they shared a pastor, a reverend Reginald Illingsworth with the old brick church Illingsworth was a Baptist who was already serving the old brick church the melding of the two congregations was really a mismatched marriage of convenience this group needed the money and joining with the other church allowed them to have a congregation and like a lot of poorly matched marriages eventually the couple grew apart irreconcilable irreconcilable differences I think is the term the old meeting house started more liberal or open theologically and it grew even more so over time it also added members dramatically under their pastor in the 1880s and 1990s leading up to this split Hamilton Throckmorton who was just here yesterday delivering the bicentennial sermon the old brick church started more conservative and it became even more conservative over time and it also shrank to the point that it needed the old meeting house which was growing so dramatically to help pay the bills reversing the original arrangement so when Hamilton Throckmorton left in 1994 this group of people decided instead of going through another awkward attempt to hire a pastor who can please both churches which was getting to be more and more difficult maybe we should rethink the whole arrangement and the writing you could sort of see was on the wall in the documents that they produced but the two churches tried a democratic approach they came up with three options keep the status quo join churches so you have one congregation but two buildings just move back and forth between them or split and they decided that each vote they'd eliminate the third choice and then they'd vote again and have a runoff sounds very simple but it didn't work very well because both churches first choice was the third choice of the other church and so they went through all this rigmarole and finally the old brick church decided by just four votes that they wanted to merge congregations and the old meeting house decided by just four votes that they wanted to be separated and so that's what ended up happening this church actually took the greater initiative to create the separation so the two churches had a rather awkward service of separation they called it on the last day of 1995 and then on January 1st 1996 they were two independent churches and they have been so ever since old meeting house ended up hiring a pastor from within Susan Cook Kittridge who had been an intern and former Catholic priest David and the church thrived under their leadership in 2003 the church became open and affirming and in 2011 hired another successful pastor Alyssa Junk who in 2015 married Sarah Katz in the sanctuary that happy event which would probably have shocked the original church's founders was certainly emblematic of the congregations openness to all especially those who have been traditionally marginalized but going back a century or more one of the things that has impressed me most about the history of the place was the strength of women in leadership here whose names aren't necessarily named but when you start looking at the documents in between the lines behind the scenes you find that it was a group of strong God loving wonderful women who kept this whole thing going for a hundred years against almost impossible odds and I daresay are still doing so for at least a century this has been a focus community activity of arts of culture and of caring I came here ten years ago and have been thoroughly impressed by that and as the church begins its third century I believe these endearing features will no doubt continue well I pushed a little to get through that last bit and didn't ask for questions but now let's have a few of those and then we'll see if people want to stay a bit longer I'm still wired I'm willing yes we can't hear you church church oh have we found any relationship between the old meeting house and the church and adamant I have not come across a shred of evidence of connection but a lot of that history is only going to be in diaries and personal memories and would probably not show up in newspaper articles a few of which are still emerging from time to time so if there was a joint service for example if something happened commemorative here they would have been invited and certainly would have come I just haven't seen the record of it so that's my own ignorance but not a negation yes do you know when this church got its name ever changed or has it always been? sandal asked when the church got its name obviously it wasn't old for a long time it was called the center meeting house and then for a while some of the documents referred to it as the union meeting house I wonder if that got a little confusing with union meeting halls I'm not sure but then they had the Sunday school union and it used the word so that seemed okay and then I kind of have to laugh because for a while it was called the old white church which was not a description of the people I don't think although it sort of was but the church was white and by that time it was old in the 1930s and 40s the old meeting house Appalachian the first I've seen of it I think was 1940s and then it caught on increasingly although it was still sometimes called the center meeting house or the old white church even into the 1950s and 60s Barb can you clarify that do you recall the first reference to it as the old meeting house yes thank you Barbara points out that the reconstituting group in 1966 informing bylaws and a covenant had to have a name and they chose old meeting house so that's been its official name since then do you know if parley davis's idea of the two other denominations using it in the off hours is there any documentation of regular services yes thank you did the church in fact find use by the universalist and the congregationalist yes and the only source we have for that interestingly well one indirect source one source is sophie daemon's book where she talks about the fact that her parents told her to come to church and they heard all three denominations here in the church the other is that we know that parley davis actually wrote letters to universalist leaders in new england asking them how it would be possible to form a universalist church here he was still paying the bills for that itinerant preacher and hoping to pull it off so that there would be a building if he'd lived long enough for the Methodist church to wane sufficiently maybe you know he could have got people in here but how many universalists there would have been to replace them when the Methodists moved out universalists basically by that time we're no longer the universalist that I described later in the 19th century the Unitarian universalists became more what we're familiar with today less Orthodox evangelical and more focused on a reasoned approach to religion and spiritual growth my relatives were the fosters who had those pews over there and I happened to sit there yesterday it's like pure point she's saying that your name is? Liza Liza was saying that she inadvertently sat in the pews that her ancestors sat in over in the corner of the fosters which was interesting and fosters had a huge families they had 10 or 12 kids and they had this pew back here and also this one here there were so many kids to fit in one pew so they were and then across from them there was a bachelor who must have just been annoyed at the noise and a couple of families that only had one kid each and it was like fosters they're everywhere my understanding is the very strong universalist so do you think there were sort of compromises that they lived it was sort of the closest church nearby so they would make do? yes, there was a lot of movement and there were Jews here who supported this financially because it was going to be the center church but they never came here to church because they were universalist or they only came to the later service not the Methodist service and it's hard to figure out sometimes which one was which some of them changed over the course of time and we have all kinds of stories that are unspoken or implied by you read the genealogy and you see one family lost like two children in a few months and then they moved to Ohio well, was there a correlation between them or you know things like that you just wonder or one family were members of both the universalist church and the Methodist church whose leaders were denouncing each other and consigning each other to eternal perdition but people paying the bills and the pews were saying I'm going there after I leave here so there are a lot of Monty of them I think question I guess would be involved in the meeting house which really these people men were concerned with keeping the building going for the town of course as well as for the churches they overlap but a lot of these men didn't overlap with people who were in a religious society well that's probably typical but I couldn't I didn't find evidence of that in this particular place maybe I'm wrong but when I look at the original trustees they were also often the class leaders or Sunday school teachers so they weren't just in charge of the building and the financing they were also very much involved that could be coincidence and it may be throughout New England the model that you suggest certainly makes a lot of sense to me normally what I found it could be that because it was more of a closed area here it was just a fairly small group and except for the Davises they were pretty much all Methodists so they all ran the place but there were a few exceptions to that and I mentioned in the book I can't remember all the names now but I'm thinking of one who was a prominent attorney in town and he had a pew here and he was a church officer but he was probably not a Methodist so that that could confirm that others yes David just to follow up on what Lynn was talking about could you talk a little bit about the secular use of the media because I think a lot of people in Montpelier do not know that this was near town hall for 20 years or East Montpelier even exists right I did mention that I didn't mention that from the 1790s to the 1828 town meetings were in Parley Davises house from 1828 to 1848 they were here and then when East Montpelier was split from Montpelier East Montpelier town meetings continued to be here until 1890 so this was familiar to everyone as a town meeting location and then the community hall which is now the parish hall was a community use building from the get-go there were a lot of things other than church activities that took place there and in fact Carol and Fred have mentioned that and helped because they have recollections of everything from celebrating the end of World War II to 4-H meetings occurring in the building so yes it has been that as well Sarah Interesting question was the lack of explicit religious ornamentation in here due to the public use of the building I can't say definitively I would guess not I think the building was designed this way because it was federal style not because it was secular or religious and certainly the pulpit is the main focal point of any New England church built during this time you can't get away from that you'll notice there's no altar this didn't want a fixed altar in their churches because it was too Catholic the focus would be on the sacrifice and from the perspective of their beliefs the sacrifice was done when Jesus died on the cross no more sacrifice that's what the papas do so instead there's a removable table so communion takes place here and the congregants would walk up to this railing to take communion but the altar is a permanent fixture the pulpit is the permanent fixture cross or no cross it's the pulpit because it's the word of God not the death on the cross that's the focus from week to week two hour sermons and your kids sit still through the whole thing Wilbur Fisk was asked to deliver a sermon to the state legislature in 1828 and you can look it up it would take you four and a half hours to read it out loud he was not invited back I don't know if that was why but they were long-winded preachers in those days it probably convinced a lot of legislators to become universalists question over here don't get any ideas from me oh yes they're bullet holes this has nothing to do with any local conflicts it has to do with local kids taking potshots according to Mark Catlin using the fish up there on top of the steeple for target practice it's a fish by the way not a cross and that is a religious symbol the early Christians used fish before they used crosses and they used anchors as well crosses were considered as shameful instruments of torture in the first and second century you didn't wear them around your neck so they used symbolic things like fish and the Greek word for fish is an acronym for Jesus Christ son of God's savior the beginning letters so fish was a big deal and the church has a fish on top and a cross yes Susie I was raised as a methodist one of them you were raised as a methodist how were you lowered yes okay one of the things we knew growing up across information about this that in the late 1830s 40s the Methodist church just met a demise where I live and obviously did here due to abolitionists and I didn't know whether you read about anything here lots the Methodist church was still the largest denomination in the United States all through the 19th century up until the early 20th century it was huge but they split into multiple subgroups and one of the main divisions was over slavery and Wilbur Fisk the aforementioned Wilbur Fisk was a main proponent of resettlement of freed slaves rather than outright abolition because he believed that if the slaves were freed outright all at once it would be terrible for them and it would throw the country into chaos well he was right about that but he gave up on the idea of resettlement before he died and realized that was a stupid idea too because it would cost the equivalent of billions of dollars to send all the freed slaves back to Africa what would they do when they got there so they realized that wasn't a good idea either but the Methodist church and a number of other denominations split over that the Southern Methodists split away and reunited I think in the 1960s took them a while to get back together when the church was reconstituted in 1966 what were the denominations involved there were four sure I get this right Methodist, Baptist Universalist and I think Congregational were the four and Congregationalists ended up becoming the United Church of Christ and the Universalists and the Methodists kind of fizzled out for lack of interest on either side and the people with more Baptist leanings tended to gravitate toward the Old Brick Church so the bylaws here initially named all four of those denominations but the main group of people who reconstituted the church in 1966 were fiercely independent from a religious standpoint and for the most part didn't want to align with any one of those four denominations and they ended up prevailing really the church has never officially aligned with any denomination even though most of its pastors for your 50 years have been United Church of Christ it's not officially a UCC church even now I mentioned in the book it may look like a duck and walk like a duck and squack like a duck but it's not the United Church of Christ church so yes 1849 was when the split occurred and there were politics involved that I don't thoroughly understand some of you probably do but the three quarters the northern three quarters of the original Montpelier is now East Montpelier and the southern chunk is Montpelier did it have to do with the train can anyone speak definitively to that? Parley Davis incidentally among many hats that he wore was the first person who pushed for having a train service come through here he and Rebecca just did everything they were actually only to stay capital and image so the people didn't have the cloud to fight it but they ended up being unhappy just reiterating that very briefly for the sake of those who can't hear from that distance there were political things involved having to do with wanting to establish the capital and to distinguish what we call the downtown area what they call the village these hillbillies up here this rural unpaved, expensive to maintain area yes you said that Parley and Rebecca had quite the partnership and you spoke to the women I hope you all know that Rebecca Peabody was known as a doctor not just a midwife she was known as a physician trained as a physician by Colonel and Dr. Moses Nichols who trained several others in that southern part of New Hampshire where she grew up she was quite a skilled woman she could do amputations yeah she was amazing in a lot of ways I like her best because of the way she handled the Chester Wright situation but somebody else whose legs she fixed probably liked her better for that also interesting the third minister of the church was James Templeton who grew up here and he became a doctor after he left the ministry because he was at a minister's conference in the city in Boston and he had some ailment and he asked doctors about it and he was so impressed he decided oh I can become a doctor and he became doctors so there were actually three generations of Templeton doctors operating out of this neighborhood but no more ministers after that also took in three to five black preachers itinerant preachers who traveled the area yeah which is another topic altogether the there were two people one Eastmont Piliar, one who lived downtown by shaws who were active in harboring runaway slaves as far as we know from the historical records they weren't hidden here because it was too far north to need to hide them but they were helped along the way so there is even here in Lily White Vermont there is some history of the whole racial divide of the country especially during that period well I think we are now at 827 so I have exceeded even the 15 minutes that I gave myself for starting late so thank you so much for your attention Mary will be around if anybody is interested in a book and thank you