History
The first Meeting House was built in 1665 and the first minister was Moses Noyes. New buildings were constructed in 1689 and in 1738. The present building was erected in 1816-7 by architect Samuel Belcher, Belcher also designed the John Sill and William Noyes houses on Lyme Street. The building was burnt down in a July 3, 1907 fire, then rebuilt with help from artists at the Old Lyme art colony in 1908-9.
Five other Congregational churches were built on essentially the same design in the Connecticut towns of Milford (1823), Cheshire (the 1827 First Congregational Church of Cheshire), Litchfield (the 1829 First Congregational Church of Litchfield), Southington (1830), and Guilford (the 1830 First Congregational Church of Guilford). All six churches have front porticos with four fluted columns, the doors of all six have the same dimensions, all six steeples are of the same design and are surmounted by weathervanes that appear to have been cast from one mold, and all six churches have twenty-over-twenty double-hung windows. The similarities suggest that some of the building elements may have been prefabricated.
The building was restored circa 2001 by volunteers, including architect Stephen Lloyd.
Read more about this topic: Old Lyme Congregational Church
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“... all big changes in human history have been arrived at slowly and through many compromises.”
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“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
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