— Photo by Tim Valentine
The Old Ship Church (also called the Old Ship Meetinghouse) is a Puritan church built in 1681 in Hingham, Mass. It is the only surviving 17th-Century Puritan meetinghouse in America. Its congregation, gathered in 1635 and officially the First Parish in Hingham, occupies the oldest church building in continuous religious use in the United States.
The New York Times called it "the oldest continuously worshiped-in church in North America and the only surviving example in this country of the English Gothic style of the 17th Century. The more familiar delicately spired white Colonial churches of New England would not be built for more than half a century."
Within the church, the ceiling, made of great oak beams, looks like the inverted frame of a ship — thus the church’s name.
From the Unitarian-Universalist World:
“The people who colonized Hingham were eager to get as far away from the influence of the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony as they could, so they settled in Hingham, twenty miles south of Boston. Ebenezer Gay, who served as the congregation's pastor from 1718 to 1787, rejected Calvinism in favor of Arminianism, the precursor of American Unitarianism. By the end of the eighteenth century, the congregation was essentially Unitarian, according to the Rev. Ken Read–Brown, the church's minister for the last twenty years.’’
New England has a great many houses of worship, at least in part because it was settled by people who were unhappy with the Church of England, or with Rome, or with Martin Luther; or who simply had a scheme of their own they wanted to try out — usually having to do with wearing black clothes and making sure everyone behaved.
From Contemporary New England Stories (1992), by C. Michael Curtis
