The Congregational Church on the green around 1875.
With temperatures like we had this winter how could people back in the 18th or 19th centuries keep warm sitting in church for hours on a Sunday?
Attending services in 18th-Century Ridgefield could be a numbing experience, and not because of what the preacher said; in winter, church buildings were flat-out frigid. The Congregational Church on the village green, for instance, had no fireplace or stove in the 18th Century.
“Women and children were allowed in mid-winter to bring foot-stoves to the church to mitigate the cold during the hour-long sermon, for the wind whistled through a score of cracks,” wrote historian Allan Nevins in his An Historical Sketch of Ridgefield. “But had any man … used them, they would have been indelibly disgraced.”
In his history of St. Stephen’s Church, Robert Haight said that early in the 1800s, sermons by the local rector could last up to an hour and a half. “On cold wintry days, when the churches had minimal heat or none, this could test the depth of one’s Christian commitment.”
How cold could it get? Anna Marie Resseguie, whose parents ran the Keeler Tavern, recorded in her diary on Feb. 7, 1855, “Very exceeding cold. ‘The Tribune’ says such cold weather had not been known in N.Y. City in 20 years. … At Mr. Short’s this morning, about sunrise, the mercury was 17 degrees below zero. It froze in every room of our house where there was anything to freeze.”
Heating a meeting house, as churches were called, was difficult. The large open space was surrounded by walls that were not well sealed, much less insulated. Since the building was not in daily use and heating was expensive, many church leaders did not consider warmth a critical need, especially since very cold days were limited to the winter — when there could also be relatively mild periods.
However, Ridgefield Congregationalists had a way of dealing with the cold. Minutes of the Town Meeting for April 17, 1749, indicate voters authorized the construction of a “Sabbath Day House” no larger than 12 by 10 feet in size. Popular in New England, a Sabbath Day house was a small building with a fireplace where families could warm up and have a bite to eat during breaks in the long services Sundays at the unheated meeting house
It was not until well into the 19th Century that churches installed heating methods, usually stoves. Old images from the 1870s and 80s indicate that the Congregational Church on the green had a small stove-sized chimney at the rear. While stoves could not heat a church the way modern furnaces can, they could take the chill off a frigid Sunday sermon.