NUTFIELD HISTORY BLOG
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Steeple Coming Down at First Parish Church in East Derry, New Hampshire
The Tower Top Takedown is Sept. 9, 10:00am–12:00 noon. Major rehab efforts on the FPC Meetinghouse get started in late August, 2015, with the takedown of the damaged top part of the tower.
UPDATE — Takedown Day is now scheduled for Wed. Sept. 9. The "flying down" of the tower top should be between 10:00am and 12:00 noon. See more updates on the Project Page.
Press Release – EAST DERRY, NH – August 13, 2015 – A very visible step in the effort to preserve a significant New Hampshire landmark will soon take place with the lowering of the steeple at First Parish Church (FPC) in East Derry.
On or about Wednesday, August 26, timber frame experts will make the final detachments and a large crane will lower to the ground the top two sections of the tower on the historic FPC Meetinghouse. The belfry and lantern will be placed in secured staging on the lawn, and a temporary roof will be lifted up and installed above the clock, which will remain in place.
It will take two years to complete the restoration work and reunite the top sections with the rest of the tower.
Rehabilitating an Historic Landmark
Built in 1769, with the current tower added in 1824, the timber frame Meetinghouse appears to be in remarkably good condition but actually needs an estimated $1.5–$2M in repairs. The tower structure is especially deteriorated, and the top sections must come down now before the weather potentially takes them down this winter.
This work on the tower is part of a multi-year effort to rehabilitate the historic Meetinghouse, ideally in time for the 300th anniversary of the church and Derry’s founding in 2019. Plans call for:
- Lifting the building to rebuild its foundation and adding an adjacent elevator for full accessibility throughout the facility in 2016,
- Repairing the timber frame and slate roof in 2017, and
- Restoring and rehabilitating the interior finishes in 2018.
“The meetinghouse at First Parish is one of the most beautiful and significant 18th century New Hampshire buildings still in active use. We applaud and support the church’s dedication and perseverance in beginning this rehab effort, and look forward to seeing their great results over the next three years.”
The tower top itself will be repaired and restored while on the ground, and be reunited with the rehabilitated tower base after the Meetinghouse foundation work is completed in the fall of 2017.
Initial funding for the Tower Takedown and early rehab projects comes from years of preservation donations and a recent $800,000 capital campaign drive within the church. A community-oriented fundraising effort launching soon and various grants will hopefully contribute towards the remaining costs; FPC has submitted a 2015 NH state LCHIP application to cover part of the $300,000 estimated cost of rehabilitating the tower alone.
“Our church has been a trustworthy steward of ‘The Old Meetinghouse on the Hill’ for two and a half centuries,” said the Rev. Dr. Deborah Roof, pastor of First Parish Church. “We look forward to sharing this rewarding challenge with the community through several dramatic rehabilitation projects that all begin now with taking down the damaged parts of the steeple.”
About the FPC Meetinghouse
“The First Parish Church Meetinghouse is one of the most significant and inspiring timber framed structures in New England. The peaceful removal of the damaged belfry and lantern frames from the tower begins a comprehensive and thoughtful preservation of the entire historic structure. We look forward to working closely with FPC as they ready the building for their 300th birthday in 2019.”
The current FPC Meetinghouse was constructed in 1769 to replace an earlier structure built by the area’s first settlers. It has served as a civic, community, and religious center for almost 250 years, and today is home to the vibrant First Parish Congregational Church UCC (United Church of Christ). Along with two modern FPC buildings, the Meetinghouse is host to concerts, social gatherings, history events, a preschool, and the regular meetings of dozens of community groups.
“The First Parish Church is the cornerstone of our towns founding. It stands high on the hill where the first settlers lived and has been a consistent reminder of our great heritage. I’m so excited to see the preservation project get underway and look forward to watching it bring new life to the building.”
With its hilltop location along a heavily traveled road, the Meetinghouse epitomizes the classic New England village church and is a well-known and much-appreciated regional landmark. It anchors the East Derry Historical District—placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982—and is thought to be the oldest structure in town and one of the oldest New England meetinghouses still operating.
Learn more about First Parish Church, the Meetinghouse’s history, the multi-year rehabilitation project, and how to contribute by visiting www.fpc-ucc.org.
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First Parish Congregational Church, UCC
47 E. Derry Rd., P.O. Box 114, East Derry, NH 03041 • (603) 434-0628
Why the First Settlers Came to Nutfield
Early movements of the First Settlers, from Ireland to Boston, Maine, and Nutfield
It’s almost sunset on a hot July 28th, 1688, and a twelve-year-old boy is climbing stairs to the highest point in the walled city of Derry, Ireland.
He’s no doubt thinking of the several thousand soldiers and residents who recently died within those walls, on this the 105th day of a terrible siege. Rations are scarce—there are few dogs left alive in the city—and only two days worth remain.
Nearing the top, the boy can hear cannon and musket fire from a couple of miles down the calm river Foyle. Emerging at the top of the cathedral tower, he can just see the great battle going on downstream. There, a wooden and chain boom stretches shore to shore, blocking the relief ships sent by King William and Queen Mary, Protestant rulers in England.
The boom was built and defended by the French and Irish army of deposed Catholic King James II. He had promoted Catholicism and threatened the Protestant establishment during his brief reign, and had been banished to France. His attempt to regain the throne centered on taking over Northern Ireland, and until now his forces had been quite successful.
The boy on the tower and his family and many other faithful Presbyterian Protestants had fled to the safe walls of Dublin to escape the Catholic army sweeping the Irish countryside. Soon he sees the answer to their prayers, as the British ships break through the boom and sail towards the city. With great joy and excitement he fires a signal cannon to let the famished residents know that relief is on its way. Two days later and the Catholics give up, abandon the siege—and the war—and a defeated King James heads back to France.
That twelve-year-old boy was James MacGregor, who would go on to found what became Derry and our First Parish Church.
The Scots-Irish migrated from the lowlands in Scotland to the new Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland.
MacGregor’s immediate ancestors had been among the 100,000-plus Presbyterians moving from the Scottish Lowlands to Northern Ireland between 1607 and 1697. They occupied the farms and towns of the defeated local Irish Catholics, at the invitation of the Anglican Protestant King of England and Scotland.
That king’s motivation in establishing this Ulster Plantation was to use the less-unfriendly Scottish Presbyterians to create a buffer between England and the unruly Irish Catholics. This was a great economic success, but Irish/Protestant tension in Ulster oscillated through the decades, peaking in 1688 with the terrible Siege of Derry we just glimpsed.
War left MacGregor determined to pursue a life devoted to peace. In 1701 he became a pastor in Aghadowey, a small village near Derry, and there lead a decidedly Scottish Presbyterian congregation for many years.
Meanwhile, Ulster became the most economically successful part of Ireland and began to rival England. The concerned British rulers took steps to control the economy and force the state-sanctioned Anglican Protestant religion on all the Presbyterian residents. This made religious and economic life more and more challenging for the Ulster Scots, and lead to yet another migration, this time to the New World.
In the spring of 1718, Rev. MacGregor and sixteen families from his congregation—probably about 300 people—left Belfast on the British ship Robert and sailed to Boston. They were first offered land in Maine along Casco Bay, and the Robert took most of the group north to check it out. They ended up stuck there for the winter, freezing and starving, until an offer of new land finally came. The Robert sailed down to the Merrimack River and landed at Haverhill on April 2nd, and a group of men proceeded North to the flock’s new home, Nutfield.
This was a 12 square mile tract known for its plentiful nut trees and rich potential farm land. The governor in Massachusetts gave them this territory in part to create a buffer between the native Indians and the more civilized establishment in Boston. This sort of attitude would persist for many years, as our resilient band of Scots-Irish settlers continually sought to clarify that they were Presbyterian Scottish immigrants, not the even more scorned Irish Catholics.
Finding Nutfield satisfactory, most of the men returned to Haverhill to fetch their families. Some of the party returned via Dracut to pick up Rev. MacGregor, who hadn’t gone to Maine with the congregation, and instead spent the winter teaching in Dracut. They all arrived there on April 11.
Sketch from Willey's Book of Nutfield (page 52) depicting the First Sermon.
The next day, April 12, 1719, Rev. MacGregor gathered everyone under an oak tree on the east shore of Beaver Lake and preached the First Sermon. This marks the founding of our church.
Nutfield grew vigorously from that point on, becoming a formal town and changing names from “Nutfield” to “Londonderry” in 1722. Much later, in 1827, a religious split led to a departure of many from our congregation to the West Parish, where they kept the town name Londonderry and Derry was incorporated as it is today.
The challenging move of the middle-aged Aghadowy congregation to New England was less “grand adventure” and more “the lesser of two evils.” In a sermon the night before their departure, Rev. MacGregor gave these four reasons for leaving their home:
- “To avoid oppressive and cruel bondage,”
- “to shun persecution and signed ruin,”
- “to withdraw from the communion of idolaters,” and
- “to have an opportunity of worshipping God according to the dictates of conscious and the rules of his inspired Word.”
This vision of religious freedom helped our First Settlers to persevere through very tough times, as had the same spirit helped their ancestors back in Scotland and Ireland.
There is much more to the story of our founding First Settlers. Derry Town Historian Richard Holmes tells the full story in his book Nutfield Rambles. Find it in our local libraries, or read a free excerpt online at Londonderry Hometown Online News.
Read much more about the religious history and background in Scotch And Irish Seeds In American Soil.
Follow the story of the settlement in Nuffield as told in 1890 in Scotch-Irish In New England.
Tower Top Takedown
Update on the Tower Top Takedown plans and schedule.
As we write this in July, 2015, we’re reviewing the Tower Takedown contract and project details with Preservation Timber Framing (PTF, Arron Sturgis’ company). The tentative schedule is:
- Build Scaffolding Around the Tower — Aug. 10–14
- Execute Rigging and Prep Work — Aug. 17–21
- Takedown Day — Aug. 26 (+/- a day)
For the Takedown Day, we expect a large crane to be positioned in the small Noyes/Meetinghouse parking lot. It will extend across the roof to lower the Belfry and Lantern together to a waiting wooden base on the north (street) side lawn. The bell and its cradle will be removed and stored, and the open top of the Tower Base will get sealed with a temporary roof flown up by the crane.
(We hope that the weight system that drives the Tower Clock can later be attached to this temporary roof to restore the time-telling function, but haven’t determined this for sure yet.)
The Tower Top should be on the ground for about two years, waiting for the Foundation Rehab project then the Tower Base and Tower Top repairs to be completed. We haven’t yet selected its exact location on the lawn, and are working with the Derry Planning Board to make sure everyone is happy with this. We intend to suitably fence off the Top for security, and may also illuminate it at night.
The projected costs for the Takedown are:
Rigging & Staging $29,500
Tower Disconnect & Fly (Crane Day) $16,300
Temporary Base & Roof $6,590
Documentation of Conditions $4,700
Total: $57,090
We’ll use current Meetinghouse Rehab funds to pay for this. The LCHIP grant application we submitted in June includes this as the first of four Tower Rehab phases: the total project cost is projected as $301,211, and we requested $125,000 towards this from LCHIP. (This is a very competitive grant process and we won’t know the outcome until December; see the July Newsletter or any BAC member for details.)
The Takedown Day marks a significant FPC milestone. We’ll be sure to spread the word as soon as it is firmly scheduled, and will arrange for safe viewing for those who can attend.
The Takedown will also be a very visible sign to the community of our multi-year dedication to preserving this important regional landmark. We’ll work with local media in advance to hopefully achieve good press coverage for the Takedown.