History in towns: Hancock, New Hampshire

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2002 by William Nathaniel Banks

The Ames contract describes the house in some detail, referring to features of neighboring houses as models. The hip roof with four chimneys, for example, duplicates the roof of Charles Symonds's house. The four corners of the facades are accented with tall wooden pilasters, and the two identical front doors with semicircular fanlights are framed by pilasters supporting molded cornices. The entrance hall and wide balustraded stair were bisected by a wall four inches thick, creating two houses. (The wall was removed in the mid-1950s.) Living and working in such proximity, it is fortunate that the brothers "were always remarkable for perfect unity of feeling." (9)

While doctors, lawyers, and merchants were building their stylish houses in the town, prosperous farmers were building admirable, if generally simpler, houses in the countryside In the 1820s Warner Clark acquired part of his father Ninian's farm and built a five-bay brick house in the Federal style (Pl. IV), with a hip roof and two chimneys. The front door is surmounted by an elliptical recessed arch in which a glass with five vertical muntins has replaced the original wooden fan.

The present capstone of Hancock's Federal architecture is the meetinghouse (Pl. VIII), which was built in 1820 after the first meetinghouse burned to the ground on October 28, 1819. The stately edifice commands the village from the common at the west end of Main Street and overlooks Norway Pond to the north (Pl. I) and Pine Ridge Cemetery to the west (Pl. X). Soon after the fire, committees were appointed by the town and the Congregational Society, and in a rare display of unanimity and expeditiousness they agreed on the location, dimensions, and cost of a more splendid meetinghouse. The town agreed to pay the society a thousand dollars to build a structure the size and shape of the Congregational meetinghouse in Dublin, New Hampshire. The latter, which was dismantled in 1852, was modeled on the Town House in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. That, in turn, was a copy of the meetinghouse in nearby Templeton, Massachusetts, which was designed and constructed by the master builder Elias Carter (1781-1864) in 1811. T he Hancock meetinghouse of 1820 was built by Jacob Ames with the assistance of Samuel Kilburn of Fitzwilliam, who had worked on the Dublin meetinghouse. Incredibly, the Hancock building was dedicated on October 25, 1820, three days short of a year after the old meetinghouse burned.

Unlike its predecessors in Dublin, Fitzwilliam, and Templeton, which had massive porticoes, the Hancock meetinghouse has an entry pavilion that projects from the main block. The corners of the facades of both the main block and the pavilion are adorned with monumental paired pilasters with Ionic capitals. Above the three entrance doors is a Palladian window flanked by two large sash windows, and in the pediment there is an oval window surrounded by graceful foliate carvings. The steeple has four stages of diminishing size, the lower two square and the upper two octagonal, all with balustrades trimmed with pinnacles or urns. The steeple culminates in a slender shingled octagonal spire capped with a wooden globe and a metal weather vane. A bell made by Paul Revere Sons in Boston is visible behind the arches in the second stage. In 1872 a large clock with a wooden face, paid for with private donations, was installed in the base of the steeple.