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The colonial meeting house was the central focus of every New England town, and was usually the largest building in the town. They were simple buildings with no statues, decorations, stained glass, or crosses on the walls. Box pews were provided for families, and single men and women (and slaves) usually sat in the balconies. Large windows were ...
Beyond the church, the Puritans founded the first elementary school supported by public money in the American colonies. They held the first Town Meeting at the church, also called a Meetinghouse, which determined policy through open and frequent discussion. The congregation's fifth building burned in February 1896, and the current building was ...
In the early 17th century, thousands of English Puritans settled in North America, almost all in New England.Puritans were intensely devout members of the Church of England who believed that the Church of England was insufficiently reformed, retaining too much of its Roman Catholic doctrinal roots, and who therefore opposed royal ecclesiastical policy.
Open town meeting is the form of town meeting in which all registered voters of a town are eligible to vote, together acting as the town's legislature. Town Meeting is typically held annually in the spring, often over the course of several evenings, but there is also provision to call additional special meetings.
Church services might be held for several hours on Wednesday and all day Sunday. Puritans did not observe annual holidays, especially Christmas, which they said had pagan roots. Annual town meetings would be held at the meeting house, generally in May, to elect the town's representatives to the general court and
The current minister is Kenneth Read-Brown, a descendant of Rev. Peter Hobart. [14] The congregation is Unitarian Universalist and is a Welcoming Congregation.Some of the meetinghouse furnishings still in use date to its founding: Old Ship's christening bowl, for instance, was made before 1600 and was likely brought to the Massachusetts Bay Colony by emigrants from Hingham, England.
Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town is a nonfiction history book by American historian Sumner Chilton Powell published in 1963 by Wesleyan University Press, which won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for History.
In the 17th century, the word Puritan was a term applied not to just one group but to many. Historians still debate a precise definition of Puritanism. [6] Originally, Puritan was a pejorative term characterizing certain Protestant groups as extremist. Thomas Fuller, in his Church History, dates the first use of the word to 1564.