John BURRIL Speaker
     In Council
     June 7. 1711, Read and Concurr’d. 
     Isa:  Addington, Secry.

     [Massachusetts Archives, cxiii, 602, 603.]

The committee, to whom was referred this subject, made a report during the next autumn; but no action in regard to it appears to have been taken by the General Court until two years later.

* * * * *

The new England town-house.

By J.B.  Sewall.

A Recollection of my boyhood is a large unpainted barnlike building standing at a point where three roads met at about the centre of the town.  When all the inhabitants of the town were of one faith religiously, or at least the minority were not strong enough to divide from the majority, and one meeting-house served the purposes of all, this was the meeting-house.  To this, the double line of windows all round, broken by the long round-topped window midway on the back side, and the two-storied vestibule on the front, and, more than all, the old pulpit still remaining within, with the sounding-board suspended above it, bore witness.  Here assembled every spring, at the March meeting, the voters of the town, to elect their selectmen and other town officers for the ensuing year, to vote what moneys should be raised for the repair of roads, bridges, maintaining the poor, etc., and take any other action their well-being as a community demanded; in the autumn, to cast their votes for state representative, national representative, governor of the State, or President of the United States, one or all together, as the case might be.

Many such town-houses, probably, are standing to-day in the New England States,—­I know there are such in Maine,—­and they are existing witnesses to what was generally the fact:  towns, at the first, when young and small, built the meeting-house for two purposes; first, for use as a house of worship; second, for town meetings; and when in process of time a new church or churches were built for the better accommodation of the people, or because different denominations had come into existence, or because the young people wanted a smarter building with a steeple, white paint, green blinds, and a bell, the old building was sold to the town for purely town purposes.

When the settlements were made, the first public building erected was generally the meeting-house, and this in the case of the earlier settlements was very soon.  In Plymouth, the first building was a house twenty feet square for a storehouse and “for common occupation,” then their separate dwellings.