Old Webster Meeting House
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Old Webster Meeting House
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| Location | Off NH 127 on Battle St., Webster, New Hampshire |
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| Coordinates | 43°19′47″N 71°43′3″W / 43.32972°N 71.71750°WCoordinates: 43°19′47″N 71°43′3″W / 43.32972°N 71.71750°W |
| Area | 0.5 acres (0.20 ha) |
| Built | 1791 |
| NRHP Reference # | 85000479 |
| Added to NRHP | March 7, 1985 |
The Old Webster Meeting House is an historic meeting house on Battle Street in Webster, New Hampshire. Built in 1791, and altered in the 1840s, the meeting house is one of a small number of meeting houses to survive in northern New England. The building was moved from its original site in 1942 to make way for a flood control project and was given modern footings for the granite foundation in 1979. The building, owned by the Society for the Preservation of the Old Meeting House, now serves as a local museum.
The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.
The Old Webster Meeting House was originally named the Westerly Meeting House. This building in Webster, New Hampshire, is one of a small group of eighteenth century meeting houses in northern New England that essentially retain their original form. Despite some alterations, the building remains the only well-preserved example of its type in the upper Merrimack Valley of New Hampshire. Built by local craftsmen according to a regional architectural tradition, the building was altered in the nineteenth century in keeping with new local traditions. Today it is a museum which preserves a record of the evolution of meeting house architecture in central New Hampshire.
The Westerly Meeting House is the only such structure remaining in the upper Merrimack Valley of New Hampshire which essentially retains its original exterior appearance as well as many of its original interior features. While the building was once one of a large group of comparable structures built in the region through the eighteenth century, all of its prototypes and contemporaries have been destroyed or so remodeled as to be no longer recognizable. The companion meeting house built in the eastern part of Boscawen in 1769, for example, was burned in 1798. The structure that replaced this eastern meeting house, constructed in 1799, was remodeled to the form of a typical Greek Revival church in 1839, with additional remodelings at later dates. Another meeting house in nearby Pembroke was converted to a barn and so remains today. That on Searles Hill in neighboring Salisbury, six miles distant, was built in 1768 and dismantled about 1790. Another at Canterbury, adjoining Boscawen on the east, was converted to a dwelling.
The Westerly Meeting House was constructed in 1791 after the inhabitants of the westerly part of the town of Boscawen, N.H., complaining that many of them had to travel five miles or more to the town's only meeting house, petitioned to be set off as a separate township. Although this division did not take place until many years later (creating the present town of Webster), the inhabitants of Boscawen voted in 1791 to erect a second meeting house for the convenience of the inhabitants in the westerly part of the township.
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