Excerpt from Henry S. Nourse’s “History of the Town of Harvard Massachusetts 1732–1893,” written in 1894.

The elders, the deacons, the tithing men, were then august and potential dignitaries, veritable pillars of the sanctuary. The latter official as he strutted his brief day with knobbed staff, sleepless vigilance and authoritative frown, has no counterpart in modern assemblies save the sergeant-at-arms of the Great and General Court, and the high sheriff of the county when on duty; but the tithing man was much more an autocrat than they in his special domain. None but a New England tithing man would have dared to halt George Washing upon the highway, and make him excuse himself for traveling on the sabbath other than toward the meeting house.

Rare qualities were required for the making of a standard deacon, though an air of calm benignity which nothing could ruffle was sometimes allowed to atone for mental disqualifications. It was a common adage that there was “good deacon timber always to be found in the Fairbank and Whitney families,” and there has never been any lack of these in Harvard.

The private pews that gradually took the place of common benches were square, and enclosed to a height of three feet and eight inches from their flooring, so that only the heads and shoulders of ordinary humanity, when erect, appeared above the top railing; and the younger member of the family could not have seen their playmates in the pew but for the fact that the upper 10 inches of the sides were in form an open balustrade. There were plain board seats upon three sides of each pew, so hinged as to turn up and leave more standing room for the occupants during prayers.

In summer time, when the windows were open, one could tell half a mile away the instant that the final amen put a period to the long prayer, by the slamming of the falling seats, sounding like the straggling musket volley of an ill-disciplined militia company.

Everybody, male and female, young and old, “went to meeting”; not that attendance was compulsory to the extent it had been under Puritan discipline 100, or even 50 years earlier; but because everybody wanted to go, to see and be seen; to hear of the week’s happening; to break the sombre monotony of six days’ routine labor; to feel the pulse of the world’s progress, as well as to satisfy the inborn or the acquired sense of religious duty. The few minutes’ gossip and exchange of personal inquiry before and after the two services had to answer all the purposes now subserved by the newspaper. This was especially the case in Harvard, we may be sure, it being a thinly-peopled, agricultural town, where everybody knew everybody else, and very probably could claim cousinship in some degree with at least a fourth part of the congregation.

To these hard-handed and hard-headed yeomen and their goodwives whose daily lives were an endless struggle with reluctant soil and fickle climate, the two weekly sermons were almost their only literary recreation, their chief stimulus to mental activity. At the appointed hours of service, all flocked to the common; afoot, on horseback riding single and double, and a very few—the rural aristocracy—in chairs. To modern eyes the assemblage, could it be recalled, would seem a strange motley; for individuality of taste was then uncurbed by any tyranny of fashion, and there was far less uniformity in color and cut of garments than now, especially in the masculine half of the congregation.

Long scarlet waistcoats with deep pockets, buckskin breeches, full skirted coats ornamented with glistening steel buttons, wigs or powdered and queued hair, and paste shoe buckles were rife. The types of female head gear were many and quaint. The contrast between the bellows-top calash or the “poke,” in the body seats, and the flaring, beribboned leghorn bonnet of the squire’s wife in the wall pew, was startling. The inconvenient and hideous stove-pipe hat and that sartorial absurdity the swallow-tail coat, so long deemed indispensable to respectability on Sunday, came in much later.

275 Years of a Town:  In June 1732, the town of Harvard incorporated within the colony, after nearly 100 years of settlement in the area and several years of petitions, objections, and re-petitions to the legislature. To celebrate this milestone, the Press is running extracts from Henry S. Nourse’s History of the Town of Harvard Massachusetts 1732–1893.