Mary Norton's Legacy Excerpts from a Sermon by James W. Crawford preached at the Old South Meeting House, November 23, 1997

[Editor's Note: after a three year hiatus, the Old South congregation returned to worship at the Old South Meeting House this past November for its traditional Thanksgiving worship service. The long interruption was necessitated by a major renovation project to the Meeting House that included a complete preservation of the historic structure, a new underground level for educational activities, state-of-art lighting and sound systems, full accessibility for visitors with disabilities, air-conditioning, and an enlarged museum shop. Here are excerpts from Jim Crawford's sermon on this Sunday that marked our return to this marvelous "meeting house".]

Our return here today carries behind it a riveting and hair-raising story. It is the story of why we left this beautiful building in the first place and the caustic and furious controversy generated by that decision.

One hundred twenty-five years ago this month our congregation left this building for good. Our congregation's departure as an immediate consequence of the Great Boston fire in November, 1972, created an Old South congregation at one another's throats. Our leaving found us at war with other New England Congregationalists infuriated by the blasphemous possibility of leaving this historic religious site and doing battle with a national patriotic alliance deriding our Old South Church forebears for their traitorous intentions to not only leave this site, but to sell it to the highest bidder, abandoning it to the wrecking ball. Depending on who tells the story, we can find, on the one hand, reflections of heroic foresight and courage; or we can discover charges of betrayal of public trust and accusations of selling out the church's mission in fact of its challenging opportunities for urban mission. To read the transcripts today transports you to the 19th century version of Court TV. We encounter a clash of rights and a conflict of moral visions.

Let me orient you, first of all, to five important elements playing a part in our story this morning. First, a decisive, critical fact: In the deed to this property Mary Norton granted to the founders of this church in 1669, she stipulated that the land we worship on this very minute, the land be for a house in which to publicly worship God, convenient "for the people that shall there from time to time assemble ... and for no other intent or purpose whatsoever." On that clause, and on what we might call today Mary Norton's "original intent," hinges a ruthless and venomous church quarrel.

Second: from 1860 to 1870 this section of Boston lost its peculiar residential qualities and became a shifting, churning commercial precinct laden with warehouses feed stores, small factories and a stock exchange.

Third, in 1856, the commonwealth, the city and private contractors formed a consortium to rid the city of its dump: a stinking, mosquito-infested, saltwater mudflat known as the Back Bay. By 1871, the dirt-fill in the Back Bay extended west along Boylston to Exeter Street, one block beyond our current Back Bay location, where Lord and Taylor, Dunkin Donuts and Pizzeria Uno now do a brisk business, there lay a putrid, noxious and toxic tidal basin. And with the creeping commercial preemption of downtown, the Back Bay dirt-fill began to support a new and majestic residential neighborhood, populated, not least of all, by some of Old South's pew proprietors recently evacuating this neighborhood- among them, Samuel Johnson, an enormously successful department store owner, Chair of Old South's Standing Committee during the conflict we outline this morning who lived at number 7 Commonwealth Avenue.

Fourth: Our church was governed and supported by what we would now label—and what was then accused by its antagonists to be -- an oligarchy of pew proprietors, owning not only the Meeting House but property surrounding it, the property next door, immediately behind me, rented since 1800 for commercial purposes, and producing a handsome profit for the church.

And of course, fifth: on this plot the founder of Massachusetts Bay Colony built his home and tended garden; on this plot Abiah and Josiah Franklin brought their boy Benjamin from right across Milk Street to be baptized; from this room the Boston Tea Party war-whopped its way toward Griffin's Wharf, from this House Sam Adams and the Committee of Correspondence drove Lord North apoplectic, on this spot Warren and Hancock delivered their Boston Masssacre Orations; and where you sit the governor and General Court assembled for election sermons.

Those five elements, the terms of Mary Norton's deed and will — dynamic mid—century social change in this neighborhood, the filling of the Back Bay, the perceived wealth and concentration of power in the hands of a few pew proprietors, and the historic political associations of this building coalesced to make, as I have suggested, to make for a kind of nasty, vitriol-soaked, dog-eat-dog brouhaha. You know, the kind of pitiless free-for-alls we discover primarily in those apparently charitable associations like library boards, hospital trustees, university faculties ... and church congregations.

The story begins in June of 1865. The Civil War over two months, Congregationalists across the country wished to hold a convocation to celebrate the conclusion of that bloody conflict and to consider new directions for their denominational future. Where better to assemble than in a building since become their national shrine; Boston's Old South Meeting House: As my illustrious predecessor, Jacob Manning, describes it, the members of this church took special pains to prepare and welcome this postwar council. He tells of vast cartloads of tan bark placed in the streets and special cadres of police deployed to divert the grating screeches of the heavier wagons rumbling through the neighborhood. "Every effort," Manning says, "Every effort was made to entertain the National Council in that building. They met. They had not been there half an hour when Dr. Bacon, the leader of the council arose and said substantially that they could not do business there. He said the building was not adapted. He said `Those who are in the gallery cannot hear those who are on the floor, and those who are near the pulpit cannot hear those near the door,' and then he moved they adjourn, and when the motion was made it was not only carried but there was a great deal of applause all through the house, which was very painful to the feelings of my people. They felt it was an unnecessary expression of their disapprobation of the Old South Meeting-House."

Oh, oh! The handwriting is on the wall . . . In any case, after that mortifying debacle with the Congregational Council in 1865, a year later, in April, 1866, the Standing Committee (Five men who governed the church), received from the Pastors and Deacons an ominous communications: "Our constituency used to live down here on Washington Street,:" they wrote. But no more. "Our houses are far away, business presses on all sides and the air around this locality is corrupted by cooking and eating houses and other establishments about us. Washington Street has become so crowded and unpleasant that it is hardly a suitable place for females to walk in the evening." Another sign of the times. And thus, in order to escape the racket and clamor on this corner, the Ministers and Deacons recommended the congregation meet in a chapel on Freeman Place, right across Beacon Street from the Athenaeum. That handwriting on the wall, if you will allow me to mix some metaphors here, now became the die cast. That April 1866 communication decrying evening risks to church-going females inducing the purchase of the Freeman Place Chapel, marks the first in a series of logical steps leading over the next three years to October 1869 when the Church's Standing Committee purchased a lot for "about $2 a foot" at Dartmouth and Boylston, on what Bishop Lawrence called that "desert of dirt, dust, mud and wind"—The Back Bay. To this time we find no record of intent to dispose of, or move from this Meeting House.

And then? The inevitable. At the annual meeting in June 1872, the pew proprietors—the owners of this church—petitioned the legislature to alter the articles of Mary Norton's deed. Remember? A house on ground for the public worship of God convenient for the people ... "and for no other intent or purpose whatsoever. The Proprietors proposed a resolution enabling them to lease any property they owned, including the Meeting House. This leasing petition no sooner reached the legislature than the all-devouring fire of Saturday and Sunday November 9th and 10th 1872 left this district a heap of smoking rubble... city center reduced to ashes—except this Meeting House -- the fire stopping at our Milk Street wall, but everything down this side of Washington Street and behind us, a smoldering ruin. The fire department, brought to its knees by obsolete equipment and horses crippled by an epidemic of the epizootic,—the fire department saved this building by covering our wood-shingled roof with wet blankets and concentrating their hoses on the spire. They saved it; but it was uninhabitable for worship and Jacob Manning's worship service on Sunday November 17, 1972-125 years ago. Manning's service for the soldiers guarding this charred district marked the last religious service held in this room by our Old South forebears.

Well, with the fire bolstering their case, the proprietors won the right to lease the building. They rented it to the now burned-out post office; they continued to meet on Freeman Place and built a chapel on that "suburban desert" at Dartmouth and Boylston. So, what began amid a humiliating and derisive Church Council in June 1861, continued through the conflagration of 1872, finally reached a culmination on a fateful day in June 1874 when the proprietors, carrying the burden of a Meeting house here at Washington and Milk Streets and a Meeting House there at Dartmouth and Boylston Streets, voted that the "Standing Committee are hereby authorized and directed to sell the Meeting House and the land under the same.: Twenty seven "yeas." Thirteen "nays". Done Deal! Fait accompli! Mission accomplished! Put it on the block. Accept the highest bid. "Tis fodder now for real estate vultures and possibly the wrecking ball.

Are you kidding? The sentiment expressed in those thirteen Old South "Nays" signaled a long-time virulent split in the congregation. Those "nays" reflected what surfaced as a national brawl among one: that Old South minority, two: the network of New England Congregational churches; and three: patriotic Americans who hounded the legislature to hold fast to Mary Norton's deed compelling the Old South Society to retain this meeting house and the land under it as a place of public worship "forever."

And they marshaled more than legal arguments. The minority and their allies charged those well-to-do Back Bay proprietors with snobbism. Senator Francis Hayes condemned the Standing Committee for consistently excluding members of "your own class and type;" he accused them of representing a "rich man's church" constantly reminding newcomers of their inferior position in a setting where "wealth rules." In addition, the proprietors found themselves assailed by the menacing speculation that if the Society should inherit a vast financial stake as a result of the Meeting House sale . . . But matters of class, mission, greed, and sacrilege aside, the city, the region, the country attacked the proprietors at post-Civil-War America's most vulnerable point: patriotism. How could a true American turn the Old South Meeting House into a pile of bricks to make room for a haberdashery?

And so, out came Patriotism's heavy hitters. Oliver Wendell Holmes began his poem The Brave Old South with the stanza:

Full seven score years our city's pride- The comely Southern spire - Has cast its shadow, and defied the storm, the foe, the fire; Sad is the sight our eyes behold: Woe to the three-hilled town When through the land the tale is told - The brave Old South is down ..."

President Charles Eliot of Harvard, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Julia Ward Howe, Edward Everett Hale, John Greenleaf Whittier, all weighed in with tribute to what they called this "sanctuary of freedom," "this most venerable and sacred of church buildings in America." "These arches," declared Wendell Phillips "will speak to us as long as they stand for the sublime religious enthusiasm of Adams; of Otis's passionate eloquence and single minded devotion of Warren in this young genius and enthusiasm, of a plain, unaffected, but high-souled people, who ventured all for a principle, and to transmit to us, unimpaired the free lips and self government which they inherited. This is the Cradle of Liberty ..."

Pretty strong stuff! But you know what happened. Amid all the passionate rhetoric, attorney's briefs and caustic antagonisms, the Legislature and Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Mary Norton intended to deed her property to the legal successors of the church's founders, namely, the Old South Society and its standing committee, and that finally, they could do with it as they pleased. And thus, friends, in 1986, twenty-five years after that brutal post-war Congregational Council shaming Jacob Manning and the members of our congregation, the Standing Committee sold this building to the Old South Association-to you Lowell and Emily — for 400,000 dollars with the provision that no church service be held here for a period of thirty years under penalty of forfeiting the building back to the Society.

So we gather here again, in this stunningly renovated building, my predecessor Frederick Meek, in November 1955, leading us back here for Thanksgiving services, the 30-year moratorium on religious services here long since lifted.

Question: had you been a member of this church, a pew proprietor, a legislator in the General Curt, a justice on the Supreme Judicial Court, would you have stood on Mary Norton's explicit intention that the land we worship on this morning be used for a house of public worship "and for no other intent or purpose whatsoever"? Or would you, as you observed this radically changing city and measured the mission responsibilities and possibilities—would you have been persuaded by another clause in Mary Norton's will, recognizing what one eloquent defender of the Standing Committee called both Mary Norton's "prayer and prediction":: that we are a "Church society for the public worship of God, being the Third Church of Christ in Boston," not a patriotic society nor a way museum—but the "Third Church of Christ in Boston from time to time"—whether gathered in this Meeting House or at our meeting house on Copley Square, whether on Thanksgiving Sunday or Easter Day—"from time to time"—wherever, whenever—"The Third Church of Christ in Boston at all times forever." +