Lynnfield Common Historic District

Lynnfield Meetinghouse is one of the three or four oldest surviving meetinghouses in the Boston area and the least changed of early religious structures in this volume. A simple rectangular building, typical of eighteenth-century meetinghouse design, the structure bespeaks the desire of colonists to create a house of worship and meeting space free of references to English church design. Although later enlarged by two bays at the center of the structure and floored over at the gallery level, Lynnfield Meetinghouse, with its handsome pedimented doorway in the gable end, preserves important evidence of meetinghouse design and construction.

The meetinghouse served the community as its only religious building until 1832, when a group broke away to found the Congregational Church and built a chapel (18 Summer Street) across from the meetinghouse. Noted Colonial Revival architect Royal Barry Wills designed a major addition for the Center Congregational Church (5 Summer Street) in 1960, inspired by traditional New England meetinghouse architecture. Nearby at 567 Main Street, the Reverend Joseph Mottey, the fourth minister of the 1714 meetinghouse, built his parsonage (1800), a handsome and substantial residence with a second-story ballroom.