Vincentown: a meetinghouse gains a second story

A meeting place became an agricultural hall

The National Register nomination for Vincentown places the Friends' acquisition of the Main and Grange Streets lot by 1781. It describes a log meetinghouse at the corner and a burial ground directly east, then a one-story brick replacement about 1812. Nineteenth-century maps identify the brick building as a Hicksite Friends meetinghouse. The nomination says the Vincentown Grange began in 1874, became active again in 1907 and bought the former meetinghouse in 1911.

Read the alteration in the walls

In 1916, five years after the purchase, the Grange substantially remodeled the old building and added a second floor. The nomination's building inventory, item 37, describes buttresses on the sides of the first-floor walls, added to carry the extra load. It also reports that no original interior survives. The surviving exterior is therefore a record of both the Friends' early brick building and the Grange's later needs, while an imagined untouched Quaker interior would misrepresent it.

The nomination gives the brick building's date as “about 1812” in its district history and “1813” in its inventory. Both point to the same early-nineteenth-century replacement, not two separate structures. A county historian's tour gives 1912 for the transfer, one year later than the nomination's 1911 purchase. The original deed remains the best way to settle that difference.

Use it as a village-history stop

From the public street, look for the two-story brick building at Main and Grange Streets and the change in masonry where the Grange enlarged it. The nomination identifies the adjoining burial ground to the east. Treat the hall and burial ground as historic property; the sources reviewed do not establish public interior hours or access across the grounds. The site makes most sense on a short Vincentown walk linking the former meetinghouse to the village's other surviving community buildings.