The First Meeting House of Epsom

In the colonial era, settlers in the small New Hampshire hill town of Epsom raised their first meeting house on this site. In colonial New England, the meeting house was everything at once: church, courthouse, town hall, and community anchor. The Congregational Society used this building for many decades, gathering here through the Revolutionary War, the early republic, and the long nineteenth century.

Eventually a newer building replaced it, and this original structure was gone. Later, the Centre Historic Club placed a tablet here to mark the spot. That act of remembrance is itself a small piece of history.

Ordinary towns like Epsom rarely made headlines, but their meeting houses were the laboratories of American self-governance, where the habits of democracy were practiced generation after generation.