Sacred Spaces of New England

Places that elicit contemplation, reflection and inspiration.

Meetinghouse

Round Church, Richmond, Vermont

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Completed in 1813 under the leadership of local craftsman William Rhodes, the Federal style Round Church is a sixteen-sided meetinghouse that was built to serve the community as a meeting place and a church for the area’s five Protestant congregations. Nevertheless, shortly after the building was constructed, several of the individual congregations built their own churches and the structure reverted to the Town of Richmond to become exclusively a meetinghouse beginning in 1880. In 1973, the Round Church closed due to safety concerns. As a result, the Richmond Historical Society was formed and with the generosity of the community’s time and money as well as its ability to secure grants, the Round Church remains today—serving as a testament to the now rare traditional New England sixteen-sided meetinghouse.

The African Meeting House on Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts

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The African Meeting House on Beacon Hill is the oldest African American extant church in the United States. Built in the Colonial style in 1806 largely by black laborers in the heart of Boston’s African American community, the meetinghouse was a magnet for the free and self-emancipated black community in the new republic’s formative years. The African Meeting House served as a center for the community as a church, school, and public space for celebrations, political and social reform meetings. Its walls hosted key figures in the Abolitionist Movement including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Maria Stewart, and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. As the black community migrated to other neighborhoods in the late nineteenth century, the African Meeting House became a Jewish synagogue until 1972 when the Museum of African American History acquired it. Returned to its mid-nineteenth century appearance, the African Meeting House is a testament to black craftsmanship and a symbol for equality and freedom of speech.