Forty Fort Meetinghouse

This meetinghouse, which accommodated both Congregationalist and Methodist settlers, is unusual in its conservatism. The simple structure of clapboards over a massive wood frame with a plain interior dominated by a central pulpit and boxed pews might have been built a century earlier. Joseph Hitchcock, born in New Haven, Connecticut, was the principal builder in the Wyoming Valley in the first years of the nineteenth century. Together with the nearby Nathan Denison ( LU43) and Swetland houses ( LU44), the meetinghouse comprises the most important and intact ensemble of New England culture below Pennsylvania's Northern Tier. In the early twentieth century, it became a shrine of antiquarian sentiment, and it was carefully restored by Thomas H. Atherton during the 1920s.