The Meetinghouse
That Bedford Built

Anita Trueman Pickett

Among the most interesting of the First Parish meetinghouses in New England is the one occupied by the Unitarian church in Bedford, Mass. This stately edifice stands in the spacious well-kept common in the center of the town. Two dozen windows look east and west, under the branches of mighty trees, and the great north front, three windows wide and four stories high, lifts upon its shoulders the bell-tower which can be seen from all the neighboring hills, and is visible for two miles across the marshes of the Shawsheen River, as one approaches Bedford along the Great Road from Lexington.

This is the second meetinghouse erected by the town, and some of the timbers from the original sanctuary were used in framing this structure in 1816. The earlier building stood within the same enclosure, and was already in process of construction when the town was incorporated in 1729, so that the first town meeting was held within its walls, and at the second, a week later, the meetinghouse was accepted and a committee chosen "to see it perfected and finished."

The spirit of those times is embodied in the petition addressed in 1728 to the parent town of Concord by certain residents of its outlying northeasterly territory: "We, your humble petitioners, having, in conjunction with the southerly part of Billerica, not without good advice, and we hope upon religious principles, assembled in the winter past, and supported the preaching of the gospel among us, cheerfully paying in the meantime our proportion to the ministry in our towns, have very unanimously agreed to address our respective towns, to dismiss us and set us off to be a distinct township or district, if the Great and General Court or assembly shall favor such our constitution."

They go on to recite the difficulties of transporting and refreshing their families especially in the extremes of hot or cold weather, for the two services each Sabbath, and pray to be allowed to have their own town and church, "that the word of God may be nigh to us, near to our houses and in our hearts, that we and our little ones may serve the Lord."

This petition was granted by the town of Concord, and a similar one, after some protest, by the town of Billerica. On September 23, 1729, by an Act of Incorporation, the General Court invested the town of Bedford "with all the powers, privileges, and immunities that the inhabitants of any of the towns of this province are or ought by law to be vested with: provided that the said town of Bedford do, within the space of three years from the publication of this Act, erect, build, and finish a suitable house for the worship of God, and procure and settle a learned orthodox minister of good conversation; and make provision for his comfortable and honorable support, and likewise provide a school to instruct their youth in writing and reading."

The church, as such, was organized the following year, with the ordination of the young man who had been preaching for them, Nicholas Bowes. It was a select company of those who could subscribe to the elaborate theological covenant of those days. But its material affairs were managed by the town. It was the town which voted to buy and hang a bell, to have the meetinghouse swept six times a year, and determined the amount of the minister’s settlement fee, and his salary. As late as 1818, the town employed Leander Hosmer to perform sacred music for $10 a year on a bass viol, and furnish himself with a viol.

During the first century, while town and church were one, four ministers served the community. Rev. Nathaniel Sherman followed Rev. Nicholas Bowes, and was followed by Rev. Joseph Penniman, who served during the revolutionary period. The long pastorate of Rev. Samuel Stearns began in 1796, and he was at the height of his power when the present meetinghouse was built in 1816.

"The last service in the old meetinghouse was held early in July," said Rev. Jonathan Stearns, who had been a boy at the time, in his oration at the Bedford sesquicentennial in 1879. "The sermon of the day took note of the event, but did not dwell on it. That venerable house had been the theater of nearly ninety years of the experience of the ancient town. There had the four pastors of the church taken upon them their ordination vows, there had the old fathers and mothers worshiped, and there had three generations of their children been baptized. There, too, through all the memorable struggles of the revolutionary period, had all the town meetings been held. But the dead past must not be in the way of the living and in-breaking future. That very week, the frame was stripped, and old, heavy oak timbers came to the ground with a crash. When the new frame was ready for the raising, the people assembled on and near the foundation, and the minister led them in prayer. It was a bright July morning, and young and old felt the intensest interest. It was no trifling matter to take up bodily the huge sides of that heavy frame, and fix them together in their places, but the result was soon reached without accident. It took three days, however, to complete the raising, and then again, on the 17th day of the month, the people assembled, and the minister led them in a prayer of thanksgiving, standing, the record says, on the floor of the new meetinghouse."

The building was dedicated on July 8, 1817, and except for the removal of two windows in the south wall, has remained the same in external appearance for over six score years, a credit to the sound design and workmanship of the builders. The interior has undergone various changes. Originally there was a high pulpit against the south wall, with gracefully winding stairs on either side. Box pews occupied the floor and the side galleries, while the deep rear gallery was reserved for the singers, their appointed leaders occupying the front seats. The sale of the pews paid for the cost of the meetinghouse, and laid the foundation of a ministerial fund. In 1847, after the Trinitarians had withdrawn, and the old foot stoves had gone out of fashion, the galleries were shut off by stretching an arched ceiling between them, and a furnace was installed. The high pulpit was removed, and the present pews were put in at that time, and some years later the auditorium was carpeted and cushioned. The organ was installed in 1887, and in 1891 the present very effective plan for the use of the galleries was put into effect. The false ceiling was removed, and a series of rooms built in the gallery, shut off from the church sanctuary by a horseshoe of amber glass windows. Through these a pleasant light is diffused from the great windows of the Alliance room, over the triple doorways of the church, and from the cloakrooms in the west gallery and the dining room in the east. A beautiful clock over the inner doorway measures the twenty minutes of a modern sermon as impartially as it did the two-hour discourses of Rev. Samuel Stearns, who faced it when it was first hung there, as the gift of the town’s generous benefactor, Jeremiah Fitch.

Mr. Stearns, like most ministers of that period, was something of an autocrat in this town, and Bedford felt the pressure of his strong Calvinist convictions. The assembly’s shorter catechism was taught in the public schools, and all pupils under fifteen were required to attend carefully to such instruction. When, in 1818, one of the first Sabbath schools in this country was established in Bedford, it was devoted almost exclusively to the memorizing of Bible passages, and of the proper replies to a long series of doctrinal questions. Meanwhile, the Unitarian movement was growing in all the surrounding communities, and many in Bedford wished to hear its more generous gospel, and rebelled against being taxed to support a ministry devoted to its denunciation.

Finally, at a town meeting on November 14, 1831, it was voted to grant the use of the meetinghouse for Unitarian preaching on the first two Sabbaths of the following December, January, March, and April. Evidently Mr. Stearns attempted to hold simultaneous services in the town hall, for we find a vote recorded on March 5, 1832, "that no minority o the religious society in this town shall occupy the town hall on the Lord’s Day when there is preaching in the meetinghouse, until it shall form a society, and file a certificate thereof in the clerk’s office: and when that shall have been done, said society shall have liberty to occupy said hall during the pleasure of the town."

The Trinitarian Congregational Society was organized the following November, called Rev. Samuel Stearns as its minister, and proceeded to build a second meetinghouse. Meanwhile, the town had voted to raise money for Unitarian preach, and appointed a committee to control the meetinghouse on behalf of the Unitarians not more than half the time, subject to a majority vote of the town or parish. The withdrawal of the Trinitarians left the church property to the Unitarian majority, which formed the First Congregational Society, afterward called the First Parish. The town dissolved its relations with Rev. Samuel Stearns, and on April 22, 1833, turned over the unexpended pew-money to the First Congregational Society. Thus Bedford ceased to be responsible for either of its churches, anticipating the action of the General Court which a few months later incorporated all existing religious societies in the Commonwealth, and took from the towns the right to control and the responsibility of supporting them.

Forty-six years later, in the previously quoted sesquicentennial address, one of the sons of Samuel Stearns could say of these events: "It was an excellent arrangement in the beginning, this constituting towns into parishes and making man, woman, and child interested in and responsible for the support of religion, but it ceased to be so the moment men began substantially to differ. The moment the disagreement became general, the system was doomed. Thenceforth, they who differed in opinion had to become separate in action. I do not propose to discuss here the movements that led to the separation. I was here on the ground during most of them, a not uninterested observer, although, not being at that time a legal voter in the town, I took no part in its proceedings. Much there was that was painful about them. I have never been disposed to hold my fellow townsmen on either side as responsible for that. They did not originate the movement. It was the result of a great tidal wave of changing opinions and newly-awakened activities, which was sweeping over this whole region, and was predestined to reach Bedford sooner or later.

"We have here now two religious societies, the heirs respectively of the old church and of the old town in its ecclesiastical capacity. Let them now, each by their own methods, and according to their own convictions of the truth and the right, responsible only to God, and paying all due deference to each other, combine their strength to make the whole favored population a pure, temperate, upright, God-fearing and God-loving people, and may God Almighty bless them both in so doing!"

Another sixty years have passed since these words were uttered, and the growth of liberalism in New England has almost eliminated the theological differences which were so vitally important a century ago. These two churches will hold union services during the coming summer. Bedford now has a Catholic church also. Many new names appear on the town roster, but all its people rejoice in their common heritage, the stately meetinghouse which was built by the town for the glory of God.