above
it, bore witness. Here assembled every spring, at the March meeting, the
voters of the town, to elect their selectmen and other town officers for
the ensuing year, to vote what moneys should be raised for the repair of
roads, bridges, maintaining the poor, etc., and take any other action
their well-being as a community demanded; in the autumn, to cast their
votes for state representative, national representative, governor of the
State, or President of the United States, one or all together, as the
case might be.

Many such town-houses, probably, are standing to-day in the New England
States,--I know there are such in Maine,--and they are existing
witnesses to what was generally the fact: towns, at the first, when
young and small, built the meeting-house for two purposes; first, for
use as a house of worship; second, for town meetings; and when in
process of time a new church or churches were built for the better
accommodation of the people, or because different denominations had come
into existence, or because the young people wanted a smarter building
with a steeple, white paint, green blinds, and a bell, the old building
was sold to the town for purely town purposes.

When the settlements were made, the first public building erected was
generally the meeting-house, and this in the case of the earlier
settlements was very soon. In Plymouth, the first building was a house
twenty feet square for a storehouse and "for common occupation," then
their separate dwellings.

The "common" building was used for religious and other meetings until
the meeting-house with its platform on top for cannon, on Burial Hill,
was built in 1622. "Boston seems to have had no special building for
public worship until, during the year 1632, was erected the small
thatched-roof, one-story building which stood on State Street, where
Brazer's building now stands."[A] This was in the second year, the
settlement having been made in the autumn of 1630. In Charlestown, "The
Great House," the first building erected that could be called a house,
was first used as the official residence of the governor, and the
sessions of the Court of Assistants appear to have been held in it until
the removal to Boston, but when the church was formed, in 1632, it was
used for a meeting-house.

[Footnote A: Memorial History of Boston, vol. i, p. 119.]

Dorchester had the first meeting-house in the Bay, built in 1631, the
next year after settlement, and by th