Sunday Go to Meetin'

Garishly colored taxis now park in Harvard Square where horses and chaises once waited for the end of Sunday meeting. Established in 1632 on the site now occupied by Lehman Hall, the first Puritan meeting house was little more than a log cabin. Cambridge itself had been settled only two years before as a "fortified place." Since the meeting house had no bell, the congregation gathered to the roll of a drum. The sober Elders later were able to buy a bell, but their jubilation was short-lived. For Thomas Hooker, their pastor, migrated to Connecticut, leaving only eleven families behind in Cambridge.

The congregation revived, however, with the establishment of Harvard near "watch house hill," where settlers had guarded against marauding wolves. With the appearance of the "college," the vigilant farmers forgot about wolves and faced an influx of new inhabitants. The only solution was a new church, so they crested a huge edifice, forty feet square, to contain undergraduate energies.

Backsliding students were not so bothersome as President Henry Dunster, who objected violently to traditional methods of baptism. But Dunster had to reckon with the Rev. Jonathan Mitchell, known to all as "matchless Mitchell a mighty man in prayer." The debate ended with President Dunster penitent, but out of office. Although the college soon came to dominate the community, church-college relations remained amicable. The President was always careful to announce the date of Commencement, so that the congregation could preserve their prayer books and cushions from destruction at the hands of celebrating seniors.

As Harvard began to grow in the eighteenth century, the meeting house became too small for Commencement exercises, and in 1756, the President sacrificed his orchard to provide space for a larger church. The new structure was a square frame building with fifty-six pews and a gallery in front for students. Since there was little room in the gallery, seats were hinged so that they could be raised for standing prayers. Students listened reverently to the pastor's prayers, but the "amens" were usually followed by a thundering crash as freshmen and sophomores competed in the art of seat-slamming. Until the clatter had subsided, hymns were almost inaudible. Noisy students were not as riotous as their contemporaries from the town, however. One Sunday afternoon in 1812, a discharged company of Cambridge militia marched triumphantly into the church, "with drum and fife affronting the Sabbath." With measured tramp and fife trilling, they filed into the front galleries, but the congregation studiously ignored them; the long prayer droned on without a break.

Not that the Elders were unpatriotic. The Constitution of the Commonwealth was framed in the old meeting house, and the General Court convened there, until a small-pox epidemic drove the austere legislators away. During the Revolution a provincial congress appeared in the church, and Lafayette himself smiled benignly from the Commencement platform in 1824. But the glorious days of the meeting house were about to end. A schism between Unitarians and Trinitarians resulted in the abandonment of the church by both parties in 1829.

Religion lost its dominant position on the key corner of the Square in 1833, when the old meeting house was razed and Dane Law College, the first Harvard Law School, appeared on its foundations. The law era lasted some sixty years, but as the University grew in wealth, the bursars office inevitably took precedence. Lehman Hall now almost obscures a small, grey tombstone, marking the site of the old meeting house, and the rattle of the subway drowns any echo of the days when Puritan preachers poured out fire and brimstone in the Square.