Welcome to installment 209 of Bidwell Lore! Over the last several weeks, we have been sharing a series about the 18th Meeting House used by Adonijah Bidwell, originally published in 2021. Today, we are sharing the seating chart for the 1800 Meeting House, a topic we did not touch on during the original series.
The first Meeting House was never fully completed and would have been an uncomfortable place to spend the day. It was deconstructed in 1795, and the second Meeting House was built a half a mile south. It is for this Meeting House that we have the seating chart from 1800 in the Museum archives. Below, you will see an image of the chart, and then below that, we share part of an article written by Kyp Wasiuk in 1996 about how the seating arrangement was determined.
The seating plan of 1800 shows that the new building was rectangular, with thirty-six pews, nine rows of four pews each. (This meeting house, completed in 1798, was enlarged sometime during the revival years of 1816-1820, with a different configuration and more pews to accommodate an increasing town population.) The plan does not locate doors, aisles, or the pulpit, but the pew located in the upper left-hand corner of the plan, designated Number One, held the family of minister Joseph Avery. The “Widows’ Pew” was proximate, indicating that the pulpit was centered on this gable end of the building. There was probably a raised gallery at the end opposite the pulpit. On the far right of the front row were seated Alvin Taylor, Isaac Harmon, Asa Fowler, and Jonas Brewer. As one moved back through the rows, other families were assigned: Abel and Isaac Benedict (of Benedict Pond), Adonijah Bidwell, son of the first minister, Lieutenant Isaac Garfield, and others less well known today: Samuel Barber, Ebenezer Chadwick, Darius Stebbins, Amariah Wheelock.
Alvin Taylor, privileged to sit in the front row, owned a fairly large farm of 170 acres, but he also leased an additional seventy-five acres. He had a large dairy herd, a medium herd of swine, two oxen, and a very small family of three, including his wife and a daughter under the age of ten. He and his wife no doubt produced far more than the family consumed. Abel Benedict, who sat in the second row, had a larger farm (200 acres), but was an older man whose six children, while old enough to be helpful in running his farm and caring for his thirteen cows, three horses, two oxen, and seven pigs, must have consumed their own productivity. Adonijah Bidwell, who had inherited his father’s farm, was also assigned to the second row.
Identifying such prominent community members must have been fairly clear-cut for the seating committee, but assigning the middle pews, beginning with the third row, was a more delicate business. There one finds Captain Chadwick, who had fought in the Revolution and had a farm of 140 acres with a large dairy herd, but who had to feed seven children under sixteen. Seated next to him was Elisha Taylor, who farmed 150 acres, had nine horses and eleven cows, and whose family included six young children and an older man (perhaps his father or father-in-law). Daniel Garfield occupied the same row, with a smaller farm of ninety-nine acres and thirty leased acres. The census suggests that Daniel and his wife, both over the age of forty-five, a male and female aged between sixteen and twenty-six, and three little girls under the age of ten, all lived under one roof. In the seventh row, near the back but not quite at the rear, a pew was reserved as the “Negro Pew,” but no individual names are listed. The census for that year counted five blacks, all unnamed and undifferentiated as to age, sex, or relationship.
Toward the back of the house, one found families like that of Ebenezer Jackson. He was an older man who held a small farm (fifty acres) and had a large family: seven children are listed, as well as one adult in addition to Ebenezer and his wife. Only one horse and six cows occupied Ebenezer’s barn.
These patterns suggest that those church members with larger families, responsibility for an aging parent or other adult, or with children who were not old enough to provide substantial help in doing farm work, were not as prosperous and thus were not seated in the first rank.
Citizens of the young Republic were filled with enthusiasm for independence, excited about the prospects of material prosperity, and not yet set back by the economic depression that would strike in 1819. Attention was moving to a greater integration of the spiritual possibilities of the next world and the practical interests of this. While spiritual life remained central, members’ material well-being was reflected in the seating plan. That one worshipped was a spiritual matter; where one sat to do so seemed a strictly material consideration. [1]
[1] This entire section was excerpted from the article “Seating and Status,” in the series Monterey Church History, Part 2, authored by Kathy P. Wasiuk, printed in the Monterey News, Nov. 1996, pp 16-18