COURTESY
NORTH SPRINGFIELD, Vt. — Paul Wainwright will present “Colonial Meeting Houses of New England” at 2 p.m. Saturday, May 19 at the Springfield Art and Historical Society Facility, 65 Route 106, North Springfield.
New England’s colonial meeting houses were an important chapter in American history. Built mostly with tax money, they were both places of worship and places for town meetings as well as the center of life in colonial New England communities, according to the Springfield Art and Historical Society.
In the Springfield area, there is evidence suggesting that as early as 1771, Joseph Little’s house along the stretch of the Crown Point Road known as Eureka Street served as the Eureka Village meeting house. Universalist in orientation, the Parker Hill village community erected their meeting house along what is now Parker Hill Road, very near to the Springfield-Rockingham town line.
This program will use photographs of the few surviving “mint condition” meetinghouses to tell the story of the society that built and used them and the impact they have had on American culture.
Wainwright holds a PhD in physics from Yale, and his book, “A Space for Faith: The Colonial Meetinghouses of New England,” was published in 2010. This is a Vermont Humanities Program and is free and open to all.
For more information call (802) 886-7935 or email [email protected].
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