History in towns: Haverhill Corner, New Hampshire

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2004 by William Nathaniel Banks

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If legal affairs were a major preoccupation in Haverhill Corner, religion also engaged the villagers. The upstart Methodist Episcopal Church was generally snubbed by the Congregationalists. In 1827 the Methodists built a grand church that still commands the north common (see Fig. 1 and Pls. II and XVII). Two years later, when the expenses were too heavy for the Methodists to meet, the First Congregational Church acquired the building to replace its old meetinghouse on Ladd Street north of the common. The capacious structure is brick, in Flemish bond, with a three-stage wooden tower. Each of the two entrances has double doors crowned with a louvered fan; they are flanked by tall round-headed windows that rise to the second story. Above each doorway a window with sidelights is capped by a soapstone lintel. A louvered Palladian window in the center of the pediment has quarter-round louvers on each side. If there is a farrago of motifs, they are combined to pleasing effect, and the church has an eccentric dignity. Grant Powers (1784-1841), a grandson of Captain Peter Powers and a nephew of the Reverend Peter Powers, had served the Ladd Street meetinghouse for fourteen years. In 1829, the same year the Congregationalists acquired their new church, he was dismissed for his dogmatism and, particularly, for publishing an indiscreet letter satirizing a Methodist convert.

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Churchgoing was a social as well as a spiritual occasion. During the hour between the morning and afternoon services the ladies chatted about domestic matters and exchanged the latest neighborhood news, while the men sometimes engaged in business discussions--although, since it was the Sabbath, negotiations were prefaced with the qualification, "If it was tomorrow...." (26) Sugar-making and cornhusking parties gave the young people the opportunity to mingle and flirt; and, in spite of the disapproval of some of the stalwarts of the church, there was often dancing. In defense of dancing Livermore asserted in his memoir that: "Persons going to a ball perfectly understood that they must wear nice clothes, and practice the most perfect manners possible." (27)

The most macabre of the social gatherings at Haverhill Corner were the occasional hangings. In 1806, when Josiah Burnham was executed for murdering two of his cellmates in the Haverhill jail, Bittinger recorded what he called "a great occasion." He wrote: "It is estimated that fully 10,000 people gathered on the west side of Powder House hill.... They came from far and near, in carts and in wagons ... old men and young men, beaux and lassies, mothers with babes in their arms, and even invalids." The hanging was preceded by singing and prayer and a lengthy sermon, but the murderer "was entirely unmoved during all the ordeal at the gallows, evincing not the slightest feeling at the eloquence and impressive words of the preacher, which melted the vast audience into tears and sobbing." (28) In 1849 the hanging of a Methodist minister, Reverend Enos G. Dudley (b. 1809), who had murdered his wife the previous year, was less well attended than Burnham's execution. Unfortunately, the Haverhill historians failed to suggest what the minister's provocation may have been.