Third Meetinghouse
Third Meetinghouse
| Address | Common |
| Built | 1738 |
| Demolished | 1797 |
| Other Lot Structures |
First Meetinghouse (1660 -
1708)
Second Meetinghouse (1694 - 1738) |
The third meetinghouse was built during the ministry of the Rev. Samuel Ruggles. The town voted to build on September 15, 1737, and in November chose a building committee of Deacon Samuel Hill, Benjamin Tompson, Esq., Joshua Abbott, Ensign Benjamin Shed and Sergeant Benjamin Frost, with timber to be made ready for the next summer. The house was to be 60 by 40 feet and 26 feet "between joynts," and set thirty feet north of the Second Meetinghouse, near where the Soldiers' Monument now stands. It was raised on May 24, 1738. Ensign Shed, Sergeant Frost and John Dutton were paid for the framing, and a large share of the town was credited with labor, lumber or nails. The old house was sold for 40 pounds, with the town keeping seats it needed for finishing the new one.
For the first time pews were the rule rather than the exception. On March 6, 1738/9 the town voted, "after large debate," to sell the pew ground to help pay for finishing the house, and ordered that a man granted a pew must sit in it with his family. A committee valued twenty-two pew sites at 5 pounds 12 shillings to 15 pounds 18 shillings, 254 pounds in all, and in March 1739/40 the town offered them in order to the highest payers of the two building rates: John Stearns, Simon Crosby, William Stickney, Jonathan Bowers, Elizabeth Osgood, Benjamin Tompson, Andrew Richardson, William French, Seth Ross, Joseph Farley, John Shed, Joseph Davis, Samuel Sheldon, John Needham, Oliver Farmer, Joshua Abbott, Benjamin Shed, William Crosby, John Hill, Nathaniel Richardson, Thomas Ross and Jacob Walker. The pews probably lined the walls, with long seats filling the center. The whole cost, 1,250 pounds, was met by one rate of 500 pounds, two of 250 pounds each and 250 pounds from the pews.
This was the meetinghouse of the town through the middle of the 18th century and the Revolution, used both for worship and for town meeting. The Rev. John Chandler was ordained here on October 21, 1747, with eight churches taking part, and after his dismissal in 1760 and two years of supply preachers the church and town together chose the Rev. Henry Cumings, who was settled in 1763 and served for fifty years. In January 1753 the town sent its first bell, hung in 1714, to Boston to be exchanged for a new one of not more than 500 pounds weight from England, selling six new pews on the lower floor to help pay for it. That English bell, which local memory said was inscribed "Billericay," was probably the one cracked by violent ringing on July 4, 1842.
By the 1790s the town wanted a larger house, and in 1797 the present First Parish meetinghouse, now the Billerica First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church, was built nearby, its pews sold on December 8, 1797 for $8,504.50. The third meetinghouse had served for sixty years. It was sold to the contractor for building a town house and school house, taken down, and rebuilt with smaller dimensions on the east side of Main Street as the Town House. It served the town and its school there for a generation, then passed into private hands as a hall and store, and burned with the adjoining hotel at the corner of Andover Street, which Hazen dates to 1876.