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Updated: May 23, 2025
These seem to me quite as unseemly, irreverent, and disagreeable disturbances as shouting out, Quaker-fashion, "Parson, your sermon is too long;" but possibly the house of God was turned into a stable on week-days, not on the Sabbath. In many parishes church-attendants were fined who brought their "doggs" into the meeting-house.
A minister in Brunswick, Maine, thus pointedly wakened one of his sweet-sleeping church-attendants, a man of some dignity and standing in the community, and received the shocking and tautological answer, "Mind your own business, and go on with your sermon." The women would sometimes nap a little without being discovered.
Even a conch-shell was enough of an expense to the poor colonial churches. The Montague people in 1759 paid L1 10s. for their "conk," and also on the purchase year gave Joseph Root 20 shillings for blowing the new shell. In 1785 the Whately church voted that "we will not improve anybody to blow the conch," and so the church-attendants straggled to Whately meeting each at his own time and pleasure.
In some communities the congregation waited outside the church door until the minister and his wife arrived and passed into the house; then the church-attendants followed, the loitering boys always contriving to scuffle noisily in from the horse-sheds at the last moment, making much scraping and clatter with their heavy boots on the sanded floor, and tumbling clumsily up the uucarpeted, creaking stairs.
If the winter Sabbath Day were specially severe, a "hired-man," or one of the grown sons of the family, was sent at an early hour to the noon-house in advance of the other church-attendants, and he started in the rough fireplace a fire for their welcome after their long, cold, morning ride; and before its cheerful blaze they thoroughly warmed themselves before entering the icy meeting-house.
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