building, usually unpainted, crowned with a truncated pyramidal roof, which
was surmounted (if the church could afford such luxury) with a belfry or
turret containing a bell. The old church at Hingham, the "Old Ship" which
was built in 1681, is still standing, a well-preserved example of this
second style of architecture. These square meeting-houses, so much alike,
soon abounded in New England; for a new church, in its contract for
building, would often specify that the structure should be "like in every
detaile to the Lynn meeting-house," or like the Hadley, Milford, Boston,
Danvers, or New Haven meeting-house. This form of edifice was the prototype
of the fine great First Church of Boston, a large square brick building,
with three rows of windows and two galleries, which stood from the year
1713 to 1808, and of which many pictures exist.

The third form of the Puritan meeting-house, of which the Old South Church
of Boston is a typical model, has too many representatives throughout New
England to need any description, as have also the succeeding forms of New
England church architecture.

The first meeting-houses were often built in the valleys, in the meadow
lands; for the dwelling-houses must be clustered around them, since the
colonists were ordered by law to build their new homes within half a mile
of the meeting-house. Soon, however, the houses became too closely crowded
for the most convenient uses of a farming community; pasturage for the
cattle had to be obtained at too great a distance from the farmhouse;
firewood had to be brought from too distant woods; nearness to water
also had to be considered. Thus the law became a dead letter, and each
new-coming settler built on outlying and remote land, since the Indians
were no longer so deeply to be dreaded. Then the meeting-houses, having
usually to accommodate a whole township of scattered farms, were placed on
remote and often highly elevated locations; sometimes at the very top of a