IV.

The Old-Fashioned Pews.



In the early New England meeting-houses the seats were long, narrow,
uncomfortable benches, which were made of simple, rough, hand-riven planks
placed on legs like milking-stools. They were without any support or rest
for the back; and perhaps the stiff-backed Pilgrims and Puritans required
or wished no support. Quickly, as the colonies grew in wealth and the
colonists in ambition and importance, "Spots for Pues" were sold (or
"pitts" as they were sometimes called), at first to some few rich or
influential men who wished to sit in a group together, and finally each
family of dignity or wealth sat in its own family-pew. Often it was
stipulated in the permission to build a pew that a separate entrance-door
should be cut into it through the outside wall of the meeting-house, thus
detracting grievously from the external symmetry of the edifice, but
obviating the necessity of a space-occupying entrance aisle within the
church, where there was little enough sitting-room for the quickly
increasing and universally church-going population. As these pews were
either oblong or square, were both large and small, painted and unpainted,
and as each pewholder could exercise his own "tast or disresing" in the
kind of wood he used in the formation of his pew, as well as in the style
of finish, much diversity and incongruity of course resulted. A man who had
a wainscoted pew was naturally and properly much respected and envied by
the entire community. These pews, erected by individual members, were
individual and not communal property. A widow in Cape Cod had her house
destroyed by fire. She was given from the old meeting-house, which was