The Monmouth inquirer., 1925-10-08
HAD FEW COMFORTS
IN r CHURCHES
Colonial WOrshipers Made
Little of Cold.

Eating together after the church ser
vices was a very common practice in
thinly settled regions during Colonial
days and it affoded a good opportunity
for the qualification of the social In
stinct.
To Sheldon church in South Caro-
lima there came seldom less than sixty
or seventy carriages, but a neighbor
planter was accustomed to entertain
the whole assembly. Those of higher
social position he invited to his W
table, while common folk were pro-
vided for by his overseer at the plant
er's expense.
At great Quaker meetings a similar
unstinted hospitality was dispensed
by the weather. Friends. In New
England care was taken at first that
every family should live so near to
the meeting house that people could
attend church without straining the
fiber of the Fourth commandment. But
when the common lands came to be
more and more divided, and farms and
out-hamlets were settled, people had
to travel farther.
In the winter time the people from
a distance spent the time between the
two services by the fireside in the
kitchen Of the parsonage house, or In
that of some neighbor who heaped up
wood against the great back log to
cheer the worshipers when they came
chilled to the marrow from the frosty
air of the meeting house.
The custom of building churches
without appliances for warming them
was very general, especially in the
colonies north of Pennsylvania, and
was no doubt brought from Europe;
one may yet sit through service in
HreIess churches in Holland, Switzer-
land and elsewhere on the Continent.
In a climate so severe as that of
New England 1t must have added much
to the grizzly rigor of the religious OBJ
servances. Judge Sewall records in
his diary on a certain Sunday in Jan
uary, 1885, when Boston harbor was
covered with ice:
sThis day is so cold that the sacra-
mental bread is frozen pretty hard and
rattles sadly as broken into the
plates"
Though in most places, before the
invention of stoves, no n ever
dreamed Of warming the building, yet
measures were sometimes taken to
mitigate the cold; the first church in
Lynn, for example, was made to de-
scend to low caves on the side exposed
to the northwest wind, and the floor
sunk below the ground.
In New York in 1714 servants are
described as carrying foot stoves to
church for the use of their masters
and mistresses, and foot stoves were
likewise used in New England In the
Eighteenth century.
In one Quaker meeting in Pennsyl-
vania 1t was provided In 1899 that a
fire should be kept in an upper room
'sfor such as are weak through sick
ness, or age, or disease, to warm at,
and come down again modestly."
But at a later period We find some
Of the Friends meeting houses warmed
with German stoves.
The southern parish churches were
probably not generally warmed, but
1t was provided in a colonial parish,
as far south as North Carolina, that
the clerk and lay reader should also
build fires wherever they were needed.
There were even some exceptional
towns In New England that had iron
stoves in their meeting houses as early
as 1880, though most of them resisted
the Improvement until after the be-
ginning of the Nineteenth century.