The Union Meeting House

From John Dearborn’s  “The History of Salisbury, New Hampshire” 

The idea to build the Union Meeting House at Smith’s Corner was suggested in 1832, and on February 26, 1834, a meeting was held to move forward with the plan. Forty-two individuals agreed to contribute to the construction and to provide financial support until the project was completed.

According to Paul Shaw in the book “Salisbury Lost” (1993, revised 2003), the building dates back to 1834. It functioned as a meeting place for Universalists, Congregationalists, Christians, and Methodists. Ministers from different faiths took turns preaching, with deacons stepping in when no minister was available.

“For several years after the church services were discontinued, the building was used for reunions of the Bean family, a very prominent family in this part of town.  In 1929, it was bought by Mrs. Storrow of Boston,  Helen Storrow – Wikipedia. She had it taken down and removed to Springfield, Massachusetts, where it is a part of Storrowton, on the grounds of the Eastern States Exposition. The land was taken by the U.S. Government in 1941 for the Blackwater Dam Basin, being tract #87 on the Army Engineers map.”

The Amazing Story of the Moving and Reconstructing of the Union Meeting House.

The reconstructed church is actually the Union Meeting House with a new facade.

“Another unique feature of Eastern States Exposition is Storrowton Village Museum, an Early American village of the 1700s and 1800s. In 1926, Boston philanthropist and Exposition trustee Helen Osborne Storrow began her search for an early New England building to house her Home Department at the Exposition.

“Storrowton’s Meeting House was originally located in Salisbury, New Hampshire, where it stood at Smith’s Corner and was known as the “Union Meeting House.”

Four religious denominations joined forces to construct the Meeting House, allowing each group—Methodist, Christian, Congregational, and Universalist—to take turns using the pulpit.

In 1929, the Meeting House was transported to Storrowton piece by piece. The paneled wainscoting, unpainted pine pews, and choir gallery were carefully reassembled. A pulpit from another New Hampshire town was added to the building, along with a bell cast in 1851 from an old church in Neponset, Massachusetts, and a clock was installed as well.

The Meeting House is the picture-perfect centerpiece of Storrowton Village. Facing south, it hosts programs on 19th-century life, re-enactments, and around a hundred weddings each year.

Time frame: 1920’s

Due to her sister’s connection to Springfield, Mrs. James Storrow stayed engaged with events in the Pioneer Valley. When the Eastern States Exposition began in 1916 as a livestock exhibition, its founders quickly realized it appealed mainly to men on the farm, leaving out their families. To address this, the Trustees created the “Home Department.” With her background in organizing Girl Scout training, establishing camps, leading World War I relief efforts for Belgium, and supporting the Saturday Evening Girls of the Boston Settlement for Eastern European immigrants, Helen Storrow was appointed chairman of this new department.

As chairman, she organized exhibits showcasing both old and new aspects of homemaking in the 1920s. She created displays about coal and natural gas for heating and cooking, food preservation, and home canning. She also arranged demonstrations of English Country dancing and traditional needlework. Helen had a lifelong passion for dancing and crafts, likely inspired by the Arts & Crafts movement’s popularity in the early 20th century.

The small, temporary buildings used for the Home Department exhibits were functional but lacked appeal. Each year before the Fair, these structures were set up, and members of the Home Department had to decorate and furnish them to fit the theme of each exhibit.

The theme for the 1930 Exposition was set as “Three Hundred Years of Agriculture in New England 1630 to 1930.” One idea was to decorate a temporary building in an Early American style to create a more appealing setting for the handicrafts displays. This concept evolved into the even more exciting idea of relocating an authentic Early American home to the grounds. Back in 1926, when this idea first emerged, no historic structure in the U.S. had been restored after being moved from its original site. While significant buildings like the Paul Revere Home and Rebecca Nurse House had been restored and opened to the public, they remained in their original locations. This predated projects like Old Sturbridge Village, Colonial Williamsburg, by the Rockefellers, or Henry Ford’s museum in Michigan.

Helen liked the idea and shared it with her friends during their visit to her home in the eastern part of the state. Among those who heard about the Home Department committee was Philip Gilbert, a Trustee of the Eastern States Exposition and Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture. He mentioned an old farmhouse his family owned and used as a summer house, suggesting Helen visit it to see if it met her needs. Consequently, the 1794 Gilbert House in West Brookfield was chosen, dismantled, and relocated to the West Springfield fairgrounds in 1927 for a purchase price of $200.

The old farmstead became such a hit with fairgoers that she expanded the concept from moving a single building to creating an entire village where families could experience life in the 19th century. Mrs. Storrow enlisted an architect and searched for buildings in Massachusetts and New Hampshire from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. She selected structures that were either abandoned or set to be demolished, preserving valuable examples of architectural styles and making them available for others to explore New England’s heritage.

Once the buildings were located, she proposed to the Exposition Board of Directors that she would buy and restore the buildings if they provided the land. Starting with her purchase of the Gilbert House, the total cost for all the relocated structures came to nearly $350,000 by the time the project was finished.

Helen established what she named “The New England Village,” and in its early years, she and her friends furnished the buildings with loans of period pieces. She staffed the Village with Girl Scouts, who competed each year for the honor of staying there during the Fair.

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Researching the Union Meeting House

Using Dr. Paul Shaw’s book, Salisbury Lost, as a reference, I began adding details about the Meeting House to this webpage. Comparing an old postcard of the church to the new construction at Storrowton left me puzzled at first. I knew the building had been modified into a Federal style, but the height seemed off. I contacted Mr. Dennis Picard, the Curator at Storrowton, and we exchanged emails throughout the day to address my question. He eventually clarified the issue of the church’s size. He had previously encountered a similar question with another structure and shared measurements and data with the inquirer. They, too, were curious about the differences in appearance, but it turned out the dimensions were accurate.

What seems to happen is the following:

Photos and camera angles can distort proportions. The old postcard of the Union Meeting House shows it with no nearby structures, making it hard to estimate its size. However, the photo of its dismantling reveals a very large framework. The image of the Scribner House on the Smith’s Corner Page clearly shows the Union Meeting House down the road, and it appears extremely large. Despite their apparent size differences, the Salisbury Union Meeting House and the reconstructed Storrowton Meeting House are essentially the same structure. Frontal alterations gave it an elegant charm and a grander appearance, which wasn’t evident in the images of the Salisbury structure, a lovely rural Gothic style suited to its time and location. The interior remained largely unchanged. If it hadn’t been removed in 1929, it might have been destroyed, like other structures lost during the Blackwater Dam Project.

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Another mystery that was addressed involved the box pews.

In his book Salisbury Lost, published in 1995, Dr. Shaw shows the above image of the box pews in the Union Meeting House.

Not being an architectural historian, I didn’t give it much thought until I sent the image to Dennis Picard of Storrowton. He was adamant that it wasn’t a photo of the Union Meeting House interior. His reasoning was that box pews were part of an earlier architectural style that had fallen out of favor by the time the meeting house was built in 1834. When I asked if they might have used recycled materials to cut costs—since the Congregational Church of Salisbury had recently replaced their box pews with more modern ones—he said it was possible but highly unlikely.

The issue:

1. Did Dr. Paul Shaw incorrectly attribute the image to the Union Meeting House in his book Salisbury Lost?
2. The windows in the Union Meeting House shown in the 1913 postcard are Gothic, while the windows in the image from the book featuring the box pews are likely 12-over-12 paned, suggesting either a different building or a renovation. If the building initially had box pews and paned windows, it must have undergone significant alterations before its removal, possibly during a period of significant population decline in Salisbury.
3. Mr. Picard discovered in the records that the Storrowton Meeting House still has the original straight-line pews from the Union Meeting House, and they were not altered. However, Dr. Paul Shaw claims the pew arrangement was not followed at Storrowton, while the curators at Storrowton insist it was.
4. In a 2022 conversation with Dot Bartlett, a senior from Salisbury, she recalled visiting Storrowton with her elderly aunt, who worshiped at the Salisbury Union Meeting House and knew it well. She mentioned only that the pulpit had been changed, noting that a significant alteration like removing the box pews would have been noticed during her lifetime.

Any extra insights or thoughts on this topic would be appreciated to help resolve this confusion.