The separation of church and state didn’t become official in New Hampshire until 1819, with the passage of the Toleration Act. Until then, many Granite Staters conducted town business and religious services in the same building: a plain, two-story meetinghouse.
For Paul Wainwright of Atkinson, those structures have been an object of fascination. He’s spent years photographing them and learning about their history.
“When I'm in one of these buildings, I get a feeling,” he said. “Not a spooky feeling, but just a presence — a feeling of the people who built and used this building.”
Wainwright turned to photography full-time after retiring from a career as a scientist with Bell Labs. He grew interested in Colonial-era meetinghouses after visiting one in Fremont, not far from his home.
Many of New Hampshire’s old meetinghouses have been expanded or modified over the years. Some were converted to churches; others are used as town offices. But Wainwright said about 20 of them still survive in something close to their original state: modest meeting halls, with a pulpit and wooden pews.
“The ones that I photographed, you understand, are the ones that looked like the Puritans just walked out of them yesterday,” he said.
For early settlers, living among like-minded neighbors, it made sense to combine church and town functions in one building, he said. But as towns diversified, people grew less comfortable supporting one particular religious denomination with taxpayer money. And after 1819, state law forbid using such funds for religious purposes.
That left many towns with a problem, though: They only had the one building.
“In true New England frugality, many, many times they built a floor at what would have been the balcony level — and they had church upstairs and town hall downstairs,” Wainwright said, chuckling. “That was separation of church and state.”
Wainwright shoots in black and white, using an old-school view camera and a cloth thrown over his head. His meetinghouse photos, collected in a 2010 book, capture the buildings’ interior spaces from unique angles — a view from the pulpit, a line of pews from above, a complex web of rafters reaching toward the ceiling. Others focus in on details — a door handle, a stairway, initials and images etched into wood.
Wainwright said his goal wasn’t to create a “guidebook” of New England meetinghouses, but to capture the essence of this type of structure.
“A lot of my photographs are interior — of this wood that's not been painted, but has been touched by hands for 200 years,” he said.
Wainwright has largely retired from photography these days, but he still gives talks on the history of meetinghouses, with support from New Hampshire Humanities. (His most recent was Sunday, Sept. 3, at Westmoreland’s Park Hill Meeting House.)
As for his favorite meetinghouse? Wainwright tells a story about the one in Sandown, which dates to 1773.
In those days, he explained, the properties closest to the meetinghouse were more valuable, since everyone had to go there to worship on Sundays. So things could get contentious when towns had to figure out where to build their meetinghouses.
The people of Sandown thought they had a fair solution: put it in the town’s exact geographic center. They charged a committee with finding that spot. But Wainwright said it didn’t quite go to plan.
“They discovered that the geographic center of Sandown is what today is known as the Strawberry Swamp,” he said. “They didn't tell anybody. They just picked another spot, top of a nice, gentle hill.”
More of Wainwright's meetinghouse images can be viewed on his website.
This story has been updated with the fact that Wainwright's talk in Westmoreland has taken place since this story first published.
