An Encounter with the Past

I've read Frederick Douglass' first autobiography and am reading the second, an expansion of the first. I recalled the experience below today as I was reading.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Frederick Douglass

First Parish Church, Brunswick, Maine

About 20+ years ago when my family and I were in Maine I had the opportunity to go to an all day meeting for clergy at First Parish Church in Brunswick, Maine, where Bowdoin College is. The meetinghouse of First Parish dates from 1845. During a break the associate  pastor asked if anyone wanted a tour of the sanctuary, and many of us took her up on the offer. We all sat in the pews as she talked about the sanctuary. She was in the pulpit, and described how Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist and orator, had spoken at the same pulpit, as well as General Grant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow read one of his poems from the pulpit. You get the idea.

She then talked about some of the famous parishioners there, and mentioned Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her husband, Calvin Stowe, was a professor at Bowdoin. She then said that it was during a worship service in the church that she had the vision that

inspired her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which enlightened Northerners about the evils of slavery. She pointed in my general direction and said that in the pew where she was sitting there was a plaque commemorating the occasion. I looked down and saw the plaque. Ok, that made my year.





I have always been fascinated by historical places--places where important events happened. Not just the site of where something happened. Places like the above. As in, "Harriet Beecher Stowe sat in the exact place you're sitting, on the same pew, where she had this vision."

Historic buildings have a great appeal. A good example is the Old State House in Boston, famous of course for its connection to activities leading up to the American Revolution. And outside the front door is a circle of brick in the square that is the site of the Boston Massacre. The guards were posted right outside that building. 

It always saddens me when historic places are demolished to make way for a shopping mall or something else. When they are gone they are gone, never to return. They are sometimes our only physical link with events of the past that continue to shape our present and will shape our future.