With the Red Barn’s focus lately on two communities a state apart – Dover and Eastport – I’m also getting a sense of people who have two or more homes and locales.
Eastport, after all, has a large number of Summer People, some of them quite active in community affairs when they’re here. Maybe some of them can explain to me how they manage.
You know, all the extra costs and responsibilities. How many possessions do you have to duplicate, and how many others need to be packed and repacked for each shift?
And then there are all of the people’s names and faces to remember.
We marked Western Easter last Sunday with a crab, spinach, mushroom, baked egg, and hollandaise dish, followed by strawberry mousse.
And today, for Orthodox Easter, we’re having grilled lamb, after a face-to-face Quaker Meeting. (We’re alternating weeks of worship online at home and in-person at the meetinghouse in Whiting.)
My wife created the centerpiece from blown shells from our daughter’s chickens, plus a few quail eggs. The tiny homemade candles are a special touch.
Do I look contented? Spring’s definitely in the air.
Oh, it’s hard for me to admit that, at least in light of the early persecution of Friends. I started out with my new book, Quaking Dover, assuming the Puritans were a monolithic opponent of religious liberty for others.
I did know, however, they weren’t always as uptight as they’ve been portrayed. In some ways they were liberal, with high literacy rates for men and women. Startlingly, a woman could divorce her husband if he didn’t sexually satisfy her. Besides, in England their Parliamentarian armies were the vanguard of the radical World Turned Upside Down that toppled the king. And they did love their beer.
As I researched my book, I began to sense that the old adage about coming to America for religious freedom but not extending it to others wasn’t exactly on target, nor was the part about neighboring colonies like New Hampshire being founded purely for monetary gain. As for Rhode Island? You see, it complicates.
For starters, the Puritans’ Massachusetts Bay charter was a commercial document, like the one for the East India Company, with their brilliance coming in immediately moving the annual stockholders meeting to the New World rather than London, under the King’s eyes.
The Pilgrims at Plymouth, too, had come under a commercial charter, one that left them strained by heavy debt. The majority of the first settlers at Plymouth weren’t even fellow Separatists in faith, but here for economic opportunity.
What the Puritans envisioned was a utopia, one within an economic, political, and religious worldview. While it’s sometimes described as a theocracy, ministers were banned from town office – not so elsewhere in the colonies.
Two of New Hampshire’s first four towns, meanwhile, were founded by ministers fleeing Massachusetts. That’s Hampton and Exeter.
And then, the Puritan fundamentalism somehow evolved into a liberal Unitarian strand and more mainstream Congregational wing, now part of the United Church of Christ denomination.
I’ve previously noted an essay by Marilynne Robinson in the August 2022 Harper’s Magazine, delineating ways Massachusetts was far more liberal than Virginia or the Carolinas when it came to religion and liberty in general. In early Virginia, for instance, missing church three times or speaking ill of the King merited a death sentence. Let it be noted, too, that Puritans, along with Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and Roman Catholics, were unable to gain much of a foothold anywhere in colonial Virginia, with its ruthless Anglican state denomination.
There are even arguments that the persecution of the upstart Quakers in both New England and the southern colonies was based more on political and monetary motivations than religion.
The historian at First Parish church in Dover had me seeing that the opposition in New England wasn’t nearly as monolithic as I’d assumed, and then that New Hampshire’s four local congregations had somewhat different characters from those in Massachusetts.
More recently, I’m facing Carla Gardina Pestana’s contention in Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts that Friends went out of their way looking for trouble. It does rather thicken the plot. The Baptists somehow found ways to fit in more agreeably.
Considering current attacks on freedom of speech (and printing), some of it under the guise of religion, I do wonder about the status of the separation of church and state.
Sometimes history isn’t so far back there as we’d like to suppose.
Join me via Zoom at 6 pm Tuesday when I look at Dover Friends’ influence in Maine – along with other surprises. We’ll start with sections of my book Quaking Dover and move on from there. (May I admit that preparing these PowerPoint presentations turns into a lot of fun?)
NEW OWNER AT THE PAPER – a Marge Schott-type – comes through, demanding everything be tightened up, financially, especially. Tighter, more threatening, a real sense of being watched. No more slides or breaks.
Of course, this kills any sense of self-motivation or deep caring about one’s contribution to the enterprise. “They” are taking as much as they can, and likely a lot more, at a superficial level.
People are removing their personal effects from the plant – how symbolic! (I started to type “planet.”)
But what about the moldy fur coats?
RETURNING TO THE OFFICE, all of the chairs are gone. In use for a conference elsewhere. Yet we’re expected to work – productive output – as usual.
AM GOING TO WORK AGAIN as features editor/managing editor out in some steamboat town. Learning the ropes again, learned that (so-and-so) was the source of dissatisfaction leading to my termination before.
Adding, looking at alumni association announcements of big promotions, the photos of new administrators etc., the portraits, especially: that well-groomed confidence. I’ll never have that look, not again. Maybe I’ve passed too far over into the realm of ambiguity or out of the superficial or just feel no desire to be that politically involved, meaning the power trip.
THE DOCTOR MOVES OUT my bookshelf during a staff meeting while I’m flirting with a blonde new correspondent. How curious, considering his reputation and my standoffish reputation.
5 O’CLOCK SHADOW. She? Or Me?
“EVERYBODY’S WORKING their butt off.”
“Leave me a note anytime you’re out of the building.”
A CONSULTANT OBSERVES AND evaluates my work on Saturday or in the slot. “You’re doing too much. You should delegate more of these tasks. (Fill in the blank) once had this great insight on a day when he needed to get away in time for an evening meeting: every manager should plan to be out of the office by 4:30, to be able to pick up his or her spouse.
I SHUT THE CLOCK RADIO OFF and nearly oversleep work!
Yes, this garage. The Asa Allen farmhouse is to the right.
One of the lingering questions about Dover Friends is what happened to our first meetinghouse after it was moved across the river to Eliot, Maine, in 1769.
It originally sat next to today’s Pinkham cemetery just south of St. Thomas Aquinas high school and was used there from the 1680s until the current meetinghouse was built in 1768.
Quaker history buff Silas Weeks was long puzzled about its destiny, relating that it had been moved again and incorporated into a neighboring garage, but he got no further than that. When we looked about, nothing resembled what we would have expected as a Quaker meetinghouse.
As he related in his comprehensive 2001 book, New England Quaker Meetinghouses: Past and Present, a bronze plaque at the corner of State Route 103 and River Road in Eliot marks the site of the first Quaker Meeting in Maine and is affixed to what is said to have been a carriage stone used as a horse block for dismounting.
When I was back in Dover last month to do a presentation at the public library, I decided to swing by the Shapleigh manor grounds to take a few additional photos for my history project. I missed the turnoff and was surprised when I came upon the Eliot Quaker site instead. I pulled over to get fresh photos of the small burial ground and, on impulse, decided to take some shots of a 1950s’ red garage sitting nearby.
As I was doing that, a woman came out from a house behind it and called out, “Are you from the town?” The tone was accusing, but I explained who I was and why I was interested. That’s when things got interesting.
She mentioned that the building had been used as a garage for at least a century and that the planks in the flooring upstairs were quite wide – something that often indicates a very old structure, as well as the King’s Pine restrictions.
As we looked about, some other things began to click.
The building is square – a nonconforming size in the town’s current zoning rules – 24 or 25 feet on each side. It would have allowed for separate men’s and women’s sides with a divider down the middle, one that could be opened or closed as needed. When I saw one side, I recalled seeing something similar a few years earlier in Fort Fairfield, Maine, where the sides and back of the meetinghouse had been left untouched when a steeple and stained-glass windows were installed on the front. The footprint of the two meetinghouses, I now see, is about the same.
It’s not uncommon for old buildings in New England to undergo huge changes over the years. Adding the garage doors where the men’s and women’s entrances were would make sense, then, as did the dormer upstairs and a back entry. A cement floor and foundation would have been reasonable changes, too. Who knows if the original even had flooring or what remodeling occurred when the house was relocated to Maine. Bigger windows, including the one upstairs on the front, would have been a no-brainer. It’s not uncommon to hear of old houses that have barely a stick of the original wood remaining.
The fact remains that when Dover Friends built their first meetinghouse, there was no tradition to adhere to. One in Third Haven, Maryland, may have been earlier. Dover’s may have predated the one in Salem, Massachusetts – a replica of that structure sits on the grounds of the Peabody-Essex Museum and looks quite different from this but of roughly similar size.
The low pitch of the roof of the Eliot garage was a concern for me, but I now see it matches Henniker’s 1790 meetinghouse in New Hampshire.
The garage and burial ground are on what had been the extensive Asa Allen farm, a surname common in Dover Quaker records. I am inclined to go along with the view that the cemetery was the Allen family’s, rather than the Meeting’s. Once gravestones were allowed, the ones that were erected adhere to common dating rather than the traditional Plain designations.
The dormer is an example of how a building can grow over the years. Neighbor Stephanie Mask has long been fascinated by the Allen family legacy.
The garage, meanwhile, appears doomed for demolition as a new generation takes ownership. The Eliot Historical Society’s website suggests that the meetinghouse was torn down in the [late?] 1800s, but even if that were the case, portions may have still been used in the garage across River Road.
As for my assumption that this was a 1950’s garage? Back to the proverbial drawing board.
Jnana's Red Barn 