Nor was a
"Sabba-day house" always seen in more lonely situations, if the sanctuary
were placed near the substantial farm-house of a hospitable farmer; for to
that friendly shelter the whole congregation would at noon-time repair and
absorb to the fullest degree the welcome cider and warmth.
In Lexington for many years after the Revolutionary War, the winter
church-goers who came from any distance spent the nooning at the Dudley
Tavern, where a roaring fire was built in the inn-parlor, and there the
women and children ate their midday lunch. The men gathered in the bar-room
and drank flip, and ate the tavern gingerbread and cheese, and talked over
the horrors and glories of the war. In Haverhill, Derby, and many other
towns, the school-house, which was built on the village green beside the
church, was used for a noon-house by the church members, though not by
their horses. The house of learning was never chimneyless and fireless, as
was the house of God.
As churches and towns multiplied, a meeting-house was often built to
accommodate two little settlements or villages (and thus was convenient for
neither), and was frequently placed in an isolated or inconvenient place,
the top of a high hill being perhaps the most inconvenient and the most
favored site. Thus a noon-house became an absolute necessity to Puritan
health and existence, and often two or three were built near one
meeting-house; while in some towns, as in Bristol, a whole row of
disfiguring little "Sabba-day houses" stood on the meeting-house green,
and in them the farmers (as they quaintly expressed in their petitions for
permission to erect the buildings) "kept their duds and horses.
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