Maggie's Farm

The Old Meeting House, Hadley, Massachusetts. Yankee readers know that Meeting Houses, in colonial times, served as Congregational worship centers, as the site for the Town Meetings which made local governmental decisions by direct citizen vote, and generally as all-purpose town centers.

(People with kids in the grammar school contributed in cash or in kind - eg firewood, bags of potatoes, jugs of hard cider to keep teacher happy, putting up the teacher in your attic for a few months, etc).

At the time, the puritan Congregational Church was the established sect in much of New England, supported by local taxes. Their spartan, barn-like buildings for worship did not start to look "churchy" until the 1800s (like the newer replacement of the old-fashioned one, on the right of my photo). The Congos were phobic about anything fancy or ostentatious, or anything reminiscent of the Anglican Church or - God forbid! - Roman Catholicism which was commonly viewed as a near-diabolical cult in New England if not a manifestation of the Anti-Christ itself.