Forgotten Voices. Carolyn Wakeman

      Lost segments of New England’s past await discovery in the scattered records of its meetinghouses. The first public buildings in early colonial settlements witnessed Sabbath lessons and prayers, town meetings and court hearings, militia drills and punishments. Today documents tucked away in libraries, archives, and attics help piece together the events, controversies, and personalities that shaped developing towns and their churches. Forgotten voices survive in sermons, in town and parish records, in wills, deeds, and court testimonies, in newspapers, diaries, and family letters. They speak of scripture and salvation, liberty and taxes, controversy and scandal, patriotism and privilege, enslavement and exclusion. Despite the passage of time, these primary accounts of religious duty, moral behavior, and civic responsibility retain a startling familiarity.

      This book tells the story of four consecutive meetinghouses, no longer standing, that defined the religious and secular life of a prominent Connecticut town over 250 years. Established by the colony’s General Court in 1665/6, the town called Lyme (later Old Lyme), initially covered more than eighty square miles of forest, meadow, and salt marsh at the mouth of the Connecticut River. By then local Pequots had been pushed east, then massacred when Captain John Mason in 1637 led a colonial force that torched their village near the Mystic River, incinerating elders, women, and children.

      Three decades later settler colonists had negotiated with Mohegan chief Uncas for lands stretching north along the Connecticut River and east along Long Island Sound and chose a hilltop location for their first public gathering place. Until a fire caused by a lightning strike destroyed the third meetinghouse on that site, Lyme’s colonial inhabitants prayed, sang, argued, voted, judged, and disciplined in a combined church, community hall, and justice court. A stately fourth meetinghouse with pillared façade and soaring spire, built in 1817 a mile west at the junction of the town’s two “highways,” excluded secular gatherings. Funded by prospering parishioners with increasingly cultivated tastes, the new edifice was designed as a house of God.

      As tourism developed after the Civil War and a railroad bridge across the Connecticut River improved access to the coastal town, metropolitan artists discovered the beauty of Old Lyme’s landscape and the charm of its historic homes. At a time of growing industrialization and immigration, the scenic town became a summer destination and an art colony. Childe Hassam, regarded as the dean of American impressionism, captured the rural meetinghouse, described as “a perfect piece of colonial architecture” and the “ideal New England church,” bathed in autumn light and color in 1905. “Nothing more American on all the continent,” sculptor Lorado Taft remarked about Hassam’s Church at Old Lyme.

      Over the centuries, what transpired within the town’s meetinghouse walls slipped from view. To explore a forgotten past, I searched for voices that reached across the decades to reveal what people thought, why they acted, and how they responded to changing circumstances, values, and opportunities. My search began when Lyme’s first church, now the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, celebrated its 350-year history in 2015. Existing accounts left me uncertain about church beginnings, curious about what had unfolded inside early meetinghouses, and intrigued by the role of public memory in the prevailing narrative. Booklets and family memoirs offered summary information and flattering anecdotes about acclaimed ministers and prominent residents. More probing local histories added documentation and depth, but gaps waited to be filled, emphases reconsidered, and assumptions challenged. To shed new light on old stories, I searched for details, connections, and contexts.

      Forgotten Voices gathers short passages from period texts to reexamine, expand, and personalize the local past. Whether a memorial to the colonial legislature about Christianizing Indian families, a Revolutionary-era sermon posing the alternatives of independence or slavery, a faded notebook detailing the formation of a Female Reading Society, or a brief notation about erasing church records to obscure anti-abolition views,