The First Meeting House as it looked c. 1720. The arches to the left are stalls for worshippers' horses and carts. Sketch by Timothy Newell Smith, 1862.
Needham vs Wellesley - The Back Story
We think of the Needham-Wellesley rivalry as primarily a football game, but there was a time when expressions of the rivalry were darker and more serious. The dispute dates back to 1720, and has its roots in a disagreement over the location of the new town's Meeting House - on the east near the coach roads, or farther to the west beyond North Hill? With few and poor roads, the western side of North Hill was difficult to travel, so although the overall distances were not great, they were still hard to traverse.
The meeting house ended up in the eastern location on the coach roads, at the intersection of Central Avenue and Nehoiden Street. For nearly 50 years, while old Rev. Townsend and his wife were still alive, there was only grumbling; but after they had passed away, someone sought a more direct tactic -
Arson!
Looking though my copy of
Needham's Bicentennial Celebration, I found this incident described in the commemorative sermon given in the First Parish Church in Needham by the Reverend William Sleeper, pastor of the Wellesley Congregational Church:
"My story begins in a town meeting, which none of you - not even the oldest citizen of the older town - can possibly remember, since it took place in the year 1774. It was the conclusion of a series of stormy meetings that followed one another at frequent intervals... The all-important question under debate was, where a new meeting-house should be located. In October of the previous year - 1773 - the old historic structure that had served the entire population of Needham as their only and sufficient house of worship was burned to the ground. And already the families living toward the West were complaining bitterly because they had to travel so far to attend church. These heroic people of the olden days did not make the distance an excuse for staying away from public worship; but it seemed to them sufficient reason for making a vigorous effort to rebuild the edifice at the center of town
[ie, farther west, closer to the current Babson College]. Hence the repeated town meetings. But the eloquent voters of the West failed to convince the stalwart men of the East that they ought to pitch their tabernacle in the wilderness, remote from settlements on either side, and we are very glad indeed
[No, they really were not. -G] that your church fathers stood manfully by the original location, and brought out a majority vote in favor of rebuilding on the old site. And now I must go on and tell of something which occurred outside of town meeting, and which shows that the men of Needham were early risers, and that determined minorities were not easily discouraged when their heart was fixed.
"It was a morning in August, 1774. The scene was the great social function of the olden times, called "a raising." The solid frame of the new meeting house had been hewn out and put together, and now it was to be raised and placed on the massive sills - tenon fitting mortise, and the whole joined together very much as the Apostle Paul describes the Living Church in one of his epistles. To lift one of these huge structures was no easy work. The entire male population of the town was summoned. But the men of the East were suspicious of their western brethren - and with reason, I regret to say. So at half-past five o'clock in the morning, the men of Needham got at the work, quite in the spirit of Hezekiah's men as they raised the walls of Jerusalem. At nine o'clock an army of sturdy volunteers from the West appeared on the scene - too late to help - or to hinder! In the journal of the Rev. Samuel West where this incident is recorded, it is said, 'When they found the work in such forwardness, they were discouraged, and prudently withdrew, although with much resentment and many threats.'"
Rev. Sleeper makes it all sound fairly benign, but tempers ran hot. Hack your way through the flowery language and Biblical references and get to the point - someone in town burned down the meeting house! The part of the story he dances around is that the arson was almost certainly committed by residents of West Needham, in the hope of getting the location of the meeting house moved westward. As George Kuhn Clarke so blandly observed in his
History of Needham, "The feeling in regard to a new meeting house, and its location, had become intense, and had borne its fruit."
A century earlier, the Rev. Stephen Palmer recounted this event and was equally circumspect. In his "Sermon on the Termination of a Century, since the Incorporation of the Town," the Rev. Mr. Palmer reviews the town's brief history. At that time, there were folks still living who had witnessed (and may have been involved in!) the events of October 1773:
"The first meeting house in this town, having stood about sixty-one years, was consumed by fire. This event took place Lord's Day night, between the 17th and 18th of October, 1773... On the 18th of November following, it was voted in town meeting, that a reward should be given to any one, who should discover the person or persons, concerned in burning the meeting house. But no one was ever apprehended. ... It is well known that the locating of this house, like that of the former one, occasioned much uneasiness and contention in the town. But it would be an unpleasant as well as an unpopular task, to bring up to view the debates and difficulties, which then prevailed. The scene has passed away, and many of the actors are gone. The great Head of the Church has already judged numbers of both parties; and there is reason to believe that many of them are now together praising him....."
Hmmm - notice he doesn't say "that ALL of them are now together..." Palmer puts the best possible spin on the situation by also pointing out that the 1774 structure was able to accommodate a steeple, added onto the building to house the new bell that was commissioned from Paul Revere in honor of Needham's centennial. What he could not know in 1811, was that the steeple would eventually destabilize the structure, and that the meeting house had to be rebuilt again in 1836.
Happily, that structure was a sturdy one, withstanding the tempests of both society and weather, and even holding together as it was dragged in 1879 from Nehoiden Street to its current location on Dedham Avenue. And they built it a proper steeple, and they still ring the bell.
West Needham did get its own parish a few years after the fire. Then in 1881, after years of trying, they voted to form their own town. To do this, they took over the old church-builders' tactics - West Needham voters arrived early for Town Meeting and took all the seats, squeezing out the East Needham voters (but that's next week's story). Then in 1882, they challenged us to football game....
The Second Meeting House, after the addition of the steeple to the west façade in 1811. Prior to the steeple, the Second Meeting House was nearly identical to the First Meeting House. The steeple made the structure unbalanced, and it had to be taken down and rebuilt in 1836. Sketch by Timothy Newell Smith, c. 1862.
