USA > Rhode Island > Providence County > Providence > The meeting house of the First Baptist church in Providence; a history of the fabric > Part 2
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The men in charge of the undertaking seem to have recog- nized that there were, for the exterior, two parts in the meet- ing-house, the "House & Tower" and the "Steeple". They speak of framing the whole house and tower, and then estimate the cost of the steeple as something independent. They fin- ished the house as far as they could and dedicated it and then turned their attention to the spire which was not raised until after the dedication.
They were right. The Meeting House is good, dignified and impressive. Its detail is correct and well placed. But the spire, the finest of its style in the country, makes the building. It is a marvelous piece of work. The design, of course, is due
John Fruman . Os of Gubbs Ormake &f
.
II. THE THREE SPIRES
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12. THE FRAMING OF THE STEEPLE
to James Gibbs, but the design had to be chosen and it had to be worked out. The Providence Gazette, of Saturday, June 10, 1775, says "the plan of this Steeple was taken from the middle Figure in the 30th Plate of Gibbs designs". Un- doubtedly Mr. Brown made the choice, but some one, work- ing from the book still to be seen in the Athenaeum, that is, from a drawing at a scale of about a twelfth of an inch to the foot, made the lay-out needed to get the heights of the various orders, the mouldings and other details, a work of much skill and judgment. Tradition has always associated James Sum- ner with the spire, but it has generally emphasized his construc- tive ability. Howland says that among those carpenters who sought work here when the port of. Boston was closed was James Sumner who "was the chief engineer in erecting the high steeple of the meeting house."1 The Providence Gazette, in the issue just quoted, goes further: "Last Tuesday the Rais- ing of the Steeple, which lasted three Days and an Half, was finished, and from a Draft thereof, on a large Scale made by Mr. James Sumner, Master Workman from Boston, as well as from the Frame now raised, 'tis thought it will be a most ele- gant Piece of Architecture."
III THE CONSTRUCTION
On Wednesday, June 3, 1774, "Some workmen broke ground for putting in a Foundation for the new Baptist Meeting House." So says the Providence Gazette in its issue of Saturday, June 7th. There was, aside from the plastering, comparatively little mason work. The old estimate allowed 340 cords of stone to which "20 cord Stones more" were added. There
1. Stone, Life of Howland, p. 37.
II
were wanted "27hhds Lime for Foundations & pillers", that is supports for the great inside columns, and the labor was put at £75 "Including the Digging for foundation." Some of the stone was furnished, probably, by Phinehas and William Brown and John Pettis who all subscribed, to be paid in stone, the amounts which will be found opposite their names in Appen- dix C. Connecticut stone steps were estimated for five out- side doors.
We do not know the name of the master mason, but it is safe to conjecture that he was Zephaniah Andrews who had built University Hall and the Russell house-later Zachariah Allen's and still later the Clarendon Hotel,-and who, in 1786, did the brickwork of John Brown's own house. It is almost a certainty that John Brown, as committee man, would employ him. It is doubtful if there was any contract. The work was probably done by the day.
The mason work was ready for the frame by the latter part of August, if not before. In the Gazette of August 27th the managers of the lottery1 announced the drawing of the "first Class", and the building committee added :
"N. B. On Monday next [August 29] the Workmen will begin to raise the said Meeting-House. All Carpenters and others who are willing to assist, are desired to attend on such days as shall be most convenient for them, for which they will receive the Thanks of the Committee." Those who think that the reward was meager should look carefully among the later items in the estimate, in Appendix B.
This fixes the date of the raising as August 29th, unless it rained. The house and the tower were probably put up then. They are mentioned together in the estimate where "Suppose 1200 Days 4/, on an average" was allowed for the labor of "Frameing the whole House & Tower". If the framing was begun with the digging in June it took sixty or seventy days to finish it, which means that a gang of twenty men or more was
1. The General Assembly in June, 1774, had granted the Society a lottery for raising £2000. It was divided into six classes and was "supposed", in the estimate of the cost of the building, to net £1900. Guild, B. U. and Manning, 221 ff .; Arnold, Address, 11 and note.
12
at work upon it, in addition to those busied in getting out finish.
No definite master carpenter is named by tradition or by such documents as we have except James Sumner. Jonathan Hammon who is mentioned in the accounts of the work at University Hall in such a way as to make him seem the master workman, subscribed £12 toward the cost of the meeting house, "in Labour" as Comfort Wheaton put down the same amount "in work", and James Wheaton £6 with the same condition. One of these men may have had charge of the house and the tower. The steeple was apparently a different matter. Of this, Sumner, by all the evidence, had control. It is possible that Sumner was the master carpenter on the whole work. It is not known when he came to Providence, but, on Howland's testimony he was here soon after the work began and prob- ably at the outset. The others may have been under his general supervision. Certainly he was in some responsible place in March, 1775, from an order by John Brown on the eleventh or fourth of that month:
"Brother Nichº Brown
please to Deliver to M'
Sumner or James Wheaton one Cask of 10ª Nails for the Meeting house & Charge it to Sd House.
p Jnº Brown
From this it looks as if Sumner and Wheaton were the lead- ing men.
The method of raising the house must have been that used for dwellings then and for long after-in fact, until a day within the memory of living carpenters. The frame was all done in what was called "scribe and tumble" fashion put together on the ground with mortise and tenon and pinned at all joints, so that nailing was quite rare. Each of the sides was complete and each side was raised by itself, one side after the other, and the plates were pinned together at the corners and the girts pinned into the corner posts. The roof was raised by hoisting
I3
one after another of the trusses of the nave to the tops of the posts from the floor of the house where the framing was done. The nave and the aisle trusses were set separately and the long rafter which runs over the back of the main truss was carried down to the plate and the braces set up under it. This will be clearer on a study of the section in figure 5. It will be noticed that these trusses are, stick for stick, the same as those in the roof of St. Martin's in Gibbs's section, figure 7.
On June 10, 1775, the Providence Gazette, in the small space it allotted to the news of Providence, announced :- "Last Tuesday the Raising of the Steeple, which lasted three Days and an Half, was finished, and from a Draft thereof, on a large Scale made by Mr. James Sumner, Master Workman from Boston, as well as from the frame now raised, 'tis thought it will be a most elegant Piece of Architecture.
It is 108 Feet from the Top of the Tower, and 185 Feet from the Ground to the Top of the Vane. .. . "
Any one who climbs beyond the old upper gallery stage into the belfry and the steeple above and examines, with wonder, the size and the number of the posts and the girts in the be- wildering forest of framing, will agree that no gang which could be put on the limited space the tower affords could have raised the steeple stick by stick and framed it together in three days and a half. Apart from the costly staging and derricks and shears required, it would have been a physical impossi- bility to do that amount of heavy framing in so short a time. It would have been equally impossible to frame the steeple on the ground, like the side of a house, and push and pull it up by main strength as the walls of the meeting house were raised.
How, then, was it raised? It was done somewhat in the same way in which Ithiel Towne, according to an eyewitness quoted by Mr. George Dudley Seymour, raised the spire of the Center Church on the Green at New Haven-it was pulled up through the tower. Henry Howe wrote in 1884, says Mr. Seymour, "An old citizen tells us that the spire was builtwithin the tower and he saw it raised by windlass and tackle. I was, he says, a schoolboy at the time. It took about two hours and
14
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13. THE METHOD OF RAISING THE STEEPLE
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It s.w. their of the BAPTIST MEETING HOUSE, Providence, R.I
14. THE OUTSIDE OF THE MEETING HOUSE IN 1789
went up beautifully."1 Mr. Seymour also quotes a historical discourse at Farmington by Noah Porter, Jr.,1 afterwards president of Yale, in 1841: "The steeple above the belfry was raised entire. . " Again, in 1873, Dr. Porter said:1 ". .. the spire itself was completed below and lifted to its place along the tower." The spire, Mr. Seymour suggests, may have been pulled up inside the tower, as in New Haven, and it seems as if this must have been done, since the posts of the belfry rest on cross beams several feet below the top of the tower, and the spire therefore, would have had to be hoisted many feet too high and lowered again to its place.
A glance at the skeleton section of the steeple in figure 12 will make clear the type of framing used in these old spires. They are in several stages, but these do not rest, in the fram- ing, one on the top of the other, as they seem to do in the finished work; they are telescoped, so to speak, the upper into the lower. For instance, the frame of the belfry stage, N, rests on two diagonal cross-beams nearly fifteen feet below the plate of the tower frame. In like manner the octagonal stage O, above the belfry, starts far below the top of that stage and near the level of the top of the tower, M. The other stages are treated in the same way.
In figure 13 the method of raising the steeple is suggested. It was all hoisted up inside the tower in sections. It probably was not jacked up or pulled up as a whole.
The tower was already raised but its front had been left open, at least up to the floor level of stage D, the huge diagonal braces show that, for they are not framed into the posts, but are bolt- ed to them on their inside faces. The tower frame, then, could act as a derrick.
Inside the tower was raised the frame of the belfry, N. Its posts, which are of pine, were pulled up by tackles hitched to the plate of the tower. It was then hoisted up to its proper place and the huge cross-beams, marked "support for N", and shown, too, at the level 2 in figure 12, were put under it.
1. George Dudley Seymour, "The Spire of Center Church, New Haven," in the Year Book of the Architectural Club of New Haven, 1925.
15
The octagonal frame O was sent up in parts. Four sides, each completely framed and numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4 in the plan in figure 13, were hoisted through the spaces between the diagonals that carried N, and the octagon was completed by pinning on the remaining plates and putting in the girts. In a similar way were the octagons P and Q handled. The spire proper, the highest stage R, had to be framed stick by stick for it would not go, when complete, through the spaces in the support for P, as is shown in the plan in figure 12.
In this manner the trouble and expense of staging the steeple was avoided and each stage was made to serve as a derrick for hoisting the next as well as to carry what little staging was needed for working upon it. The stages for finishing could be built out through the openings. The boarding could be put on overhand from the inside. Some staging was probably needed for setting the vane which was made by Samuel Ham- lin.
The sum of £74.10 was set down in the old estimate for "Painting the whole outside including foundation steple and all computed at 1788 yds", and £15 for "do in side, all the wood work except the Pews & flours." Gov. Arnold says1 the spire was painted in 1787 and that, in 1791 Nicholas Brown's daughter, Hope, offered to give the painting of the interior of the house, and his context implies that the building had not till then been painted. It may be that the wood work had received only a priming coat.
An early vote of the Society decreed the use of slate on the roof, but the estimate calls for "60™ Shingles a 21/ .. £63", and allows £10 for "paint" the roofe with Tar & Spannish Brown."
There is still a little paving of cobblestones close to the wall on the west side of the house. It is impossible to say how old this may be, but it is very interesting in the light of the old estimate which has an item of £45 for "Prepairing, Gravilling & Paveing a Strip from the Street to the Tower 30 Feet wide", and another of £50 for "Paveing a Strip Round the House 16 feet wide."
1. S. G. Arnold, Address on the One Hundredth Anniversary, p. 17. MS. Records.
I6
A clock and a bell were provided at the outset. Stone, in his Mechanics' Festival, records a tradition that the committee purchased a one-day time piece and notes Caleb Wheaton's comment that the clock was built by a Christian since it was so well made. At any rate it did not cease to tell time for the congregation till 1873 and is still on duty in the tower of the Congdon street meeting house.
The present clock has larger dials than the old one, for the framing around the openings is all new and the old girts have been cut off. There were originally, moreover, only three dials, those on the north, the west, and the south faces. On the eastern face of the tower there was, as will appear in figure 16, a plain round-headed or "Cumpas" window. The old esti- mate gives for "a Clock and Dial Plate ... £100".
"A Bell and Hanging Suppose. . 1200 1bs a 2/6 & £10 for hang&" was set down at £160. The bell imported from Eng- land with the quaint inscription upon it weighed 2515 pounds.1 It was broken in 1787 and was recast, and again cracked in 1844 when it had to be recast twice.
IV THE CHANGES
The changes in the meeting house have been many and some of them have been sweeping, but they have been mostly on the inside. They began, as we might expect, with the seating and soon extended with the growing need for room. On the outside, the building, except at the east end, has changed very little. The old grading has been done away and corresponding alterations have been made in the steps. The light space around the basement has altered the setting to any one stand-
1. Arnold, ut sup. p. 15.
17
ing near though not to the distant observer, but a good deal of the old slope is still there, and, above the water table, the house, if it were not for the eastern baptistery added in 1884, would look almost as it did in 1775.
Early pictures of the meeting house from which we may get an idea of its original appearance and of its original surround- ings are almost wanting. An engraving on copper by Samuel Hill,1 of Boston, appeared in the Massachusetts Magazine for August, 1789. This appears in figure 14. Another early print, a lithograph, seems to be a copy of this. A steel engrav- ing of 1839 shows the meeting house set in an English church yard, and this apparently was copied in a print which has a title in French and Spanish. There is no other view before the steel engraving of a drawing by J. W. Lincoln in 1856. About that time the photographs appear. In figure 15 is reproduced an old daguerreotype which is the earliest abso- lutely trustworthy picture we have. Then come the old in- terior, figure 17, from a photograph said to date from 1854, and the old east end in figure 16. The view shown in the front- ispiece was probably taken in the later seventies, since it shows the present clock.
In weighing the evidence of old prints there is always, of course, the question, did the artist draw from the actual build- ing or from memory, from some description or from some slight sketch by another hand. In the case of Hill's print it might seem at first that he must have worked from the building. But-he omits the forebuilding from which, as the church now stands, the tower rises.
In his picture the tower, in its own width, comes straight up from the ground. This is a treasonable statement. If it is true the forebuilding must be a later widening of the tower. The only witness we can now question is the house itself, and while some of the present dispositions of the forebuilding are very hard to explain, the testimony of the fabric, as far as we can now get at it, condemns Hill's work as inaccurate. There
1. Bayley and Goodspeed edrs., Dunlap's History of the Arts of Design, III, 308.
18
FASEN
I5. THE OUTSIDE OF THE MEETING HOUSE IN THE FIFTIES
16. THE EAST END OF THE MEETING HOUSE BEFORE THE OUTSIDE CHANGES
17. THE INSIDE OF THE MEETING HOUSE LOOKING EAST IN 1854
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I8. THE PLAN OF THE GALLERY BETWEEN 1808 AND 1839
is nothing to show that the tower was not always in the fore- building as it now is.
Until 1802 the space under the house was simply a cellar which was let for storage. We do not know where the doors were. It seems unlikely that merchandize would be allowed entrance through the door in the tower. It is very possible that the present side doors, in spite of the difficulty offered by the old grades, are in the place of earlier ones, for it is signifi- cant that the old estimate called for seven outside doors. Connecticut stone steps were estimated for but five, but all the seven were to have "Fruntices & Casings."
A change in the basement was made in this year, 1802. A room was built in it for the use of the church, the first of a series of changes which finally brought the whole space below the house into use and which has hardly ended in our own day. This movement need not be traced in detail for, important in the life of the church as it certainly was, its effect on the ar- chitectural quality of the great building above it was very slight.
We have noted the primitive seating originally proposed for the galleries. In 1788 pews were talked of and in 1790 sixty were built, each five feet eight inches square, arranged, as is shown by figure 18 which reproduces an ancient "Platt of the Galleries" found by Mr. C. H. Guild. The wide upper platform in the galleries which now holds two rows of slips, apparently carried the back line of pews while the front line was close to the parapet or front of the gallery.1
A change in the musical part of a ritual generally involves a change in ecclesiastical architecture, and to this rule, which is nearly if not quite as old as Christianity, the First Baptist Meeting House is no exception.
There was trouble over the bringing in of a bass-viol in 1804. This was, no doubt to accompany the "choristers", for singing was already a part of the service. "The chorist-
1. This old plan probably represents a change from the original arrangement in the front gallery, since we know from the records, June 29, 1789, that it was intended to leave "about 20 feet on each side the door that enters into the Gallery to be appropriated for Seats or benches to accomodate Strangers or those who have no Pews".
19
er seats", apparently in the front gallery, are mentioned in the records on June 25 17911, and again in 1793. The bass- viol came to stay and, on April 20, 1807, the Society voted that the seats in the gallery "be so altered as to accomodate the singers." The old plan in figure 18 probably shows this change which must have been slight as it cost only about sixty-six dollars.
The most sweeping change came in 1832. Some years be- fore that date a movement toward more comfortable and more fashionable seats had been started, but in this year it was car- ried out. Nor did the innovation stop there. Not only were all the old square pews, the whole one hundred and twenty-six, taken out but the old pulpit and its canopy were torn away also, and pews and pulpit bestowed upon the Freewill Baptist meeting house in Centerdale, as has already been recorded.
A few years later, in 1839, the sixty pews in the gallery fol- lowed their brethren on the main floor, but here the Society was apparently more thrifty, for a close examination of the backs of the slips which have replaced the older seating, will pretty surely prove that these are made up out of the wreckage of the gallery pews.
A pulpit of the Greek Revival type parts of which are now in the tower took the place of the original lofty structure from which Manning preached his dedication sermon one hundred and fifty years ago. To this preceded the curious form which is given in figure 17, which shows the inside in 1854.
It is difficult for us to imagine the meeting house without the organ but that was not set up till 1834, a gift by Nicholas Brown. To make room for it, the old upper gallery had to be taken down. The entrance to this was plastered up, with the lunettes which lighted it from the two round windows still to be seen on the outside one on either side of the tower. It soon became a tradition and few of the younger people know that it ever existed.
1. On motion of Dr. Manning it was voted that: "two seats inclosed in one pew in front of the gallery and and south of the chorister seats be finished . . and appropriated to . . members of the College . " and that two others, on the north, should be for the "use of such as may join in the music."
20
ORGAN
-
The destruction of the - MODERN (OLD PANELLING, HERE) DOOR MODERN DOOR old upper gallery brought LATE DOOR LATE DOOR MARKS OF OLD OPENING TAKEN OFF OLD DRACE CUT OFF- MOVED about a change in the RAIL & ORIGINAL PLACE OF STAIRS stairs thereto which is OLD STRING IN WALL OPEN shown in figure 19. The WELL NEW PLATFORM HUNGH! FROM CEILING old stairs from the main DOWN ROD NEW WINDERS gallery level were taken DOWN out of the tower. One VENETIAN WINDOW flight was re-set, in part, 19. THE CHANGES IN THE STAIRS TO THE UPPER GALLERY IN 1834 in the forebuilding at the south, the other was done away with so that the upper part, as it comes down from the old gallery stops dead against the north wall of the tower.
In 1846 the final touch was put to the new picture-the old "Vernition" or Palladian window, once behind the pulpit, was covered with plaster. The bare wall covers it, in figure 17.
All this, with the change in the gallery pews and the new pulpit must have made the interior a strange place to the older people. Gov. Arnold remarked: "But little besides the elegant chandelier remained to remind one of the past."1 The cluster, the gift of Hope Brown, and lighted, says tradition, on the evening of her marriage to Mr. Ives, is, happily, still hanging in its place and giving light to the house.
The inside was painted in 1791, perhaps in 1832 because of the great changes, and again in 1846 or 1847. The paint of 1846 was almost certainly white, as is that on the woodwork today, and so, probably, was that of 1832, but in 1791 the painters would have used the grey green color of Colonial times which is still to be seen in parts of the tower and on the hidden side of some of the doors.
Such is the history of the meeting house fabric. If its past is safe, even with all the changes we regret, it is good to hear that the future is secure. For, well as our fathers wrought the beautiful house they have left us, their work is brought to naught if we of this day do not preserve as well as revere and admire.
1. Arnold, Address ut sup. 19.
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APPENDICES
A. THE COPY OF GIBBS'S BOOK
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