Paris Hill Common as it looked ca. 1822
Hamlin Memorial Library and Museum
Text by Richard Judd
Images from Maine Historical Society
The image of New England towns with tall steepled Congregational churches as the center point is ubiquitous. Much of coastal Maine in the years following the American Revolution were largely Congregational, guided by Harvard educated ministers trained in Puritan theocracy and transmitting a vision of society as a well ordered hierarchy predicated on deference to God and the social elite.
Inland Maine was a different story. The end of the war brought increased settlement to Maine. Large-landowning proprietors parceled out territory to those who could afford to pay the high prices they charged.
In many places, settlers just claimed land, acting on the belief that it was -- or should be -- public land available to all.
Many of these frontier settlers were not interested in the social conventions of the more established coastal communities, nor the social and economic hierarchies that accompanied them.
Mark Fernald letter from Boston to Ephraim Stinchfield, 1816
Maine Historical Society
With their pioneering spirits, the new settlers brought with them new religious expressions.
On the frontier, revivals and religious awakenings, often spearheaded by young women or radical itinerant preachers, moved like wildfire, clearing the way for evangelical Methodist or Baptist ministers, particularly in areas cut off from the established church by poverty and isolation.
Stressing simplicity of doctrine and organization, these preachers de-emphasized classical or scriptural learning and encouraged spontaneous participation in a collective worship that dissolved the distinction between preacher and laity. They offered adherents an opportunity to seek their own path to heaven through "good works" or ecstatic experience.
The belief that all persons were equal before the Lord blended easily into the republican ideology that characterized the frontier, and services held in barns, homes, and fields fit the make-do nature of frontier life.
Enjoying "free choice" in religion, adherents were likely to demand free choice in voting: a challenge to the expectations of the Great Proprietors.
Shaker Meeting, Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, 1885
United Society of Shakers
The new sects nurtured by these revivals – Freewill Baptists, Shakers, Methodists, Universalists – advanced at expense of the Congregational Church, which was too expensive, too cumbersome, and too hierarchical to appeal to the formative frontier society.
The Toleration Act of 1811 gave individual dissenters exemption from compulsory ministerial taxes, and by 1820, these new religions had become the dominant institutions in the inland towns.
Religious controversy helped forge a new democratic constituency that disposed the inland towns to Maine's separation from Massachusetts in the years after the Revolution.
