Tours of the Meetinghouse to Holiday Village visitors at 11:15 am and 1pm.
(There is no fee to attend.)
Please also plan to have Soup on the Rocky Plain and enjoy the other festivities of the Sudbury Holiday Village!
You have driven past Sudbury’s Historic Meetinghouse a thousand times. But you probably don’t know who built it and when, why it is Sudbury’s anchor to the past, why it was built on this hill, and what it looks like inside.
Now you can learn all of that and more by taking a free tour of the historic Meetinghouse during Sudbury’s Holiday Village on December 2, 2023. Our Town Historian, Jan Hardenbergh, will take you on a tour of the meetinghouse, inside and out.
You will:
• See hand-hews beams salvaged from the earlier, smaller, structure,
• See the Cole and Woodbury tracker-action pipe organ,
• Peer up into the clock tower and learn about the flatbed-striker clock that chimes the hours.
• Toll the Holbrook bell that chimes the hours for Sudbury residents,
• See the horse-and-buggy sheds
A little bit of history…
The Sudbury Town Center was located here in 1723 when the West Side Meetinghouse was built on the “The Rocky Plain.” The original church of the Sudbury Plantation was then split between the Westerly Precinct and the Easterly Precinct. In 1780 the East Side split off and became what is now Wayland.
1722 – Rocky Plains site selected for West Parish
1723 – First Meetinghouse completed, 300 years ago!
1775 – Sudbury Militia and Minute muster before heading to the North Bridge for the Battle of Concord
1780 – East Parish splits off as a separate town — initially called East Sudbury but later Wayland
1797 – Present Meetinghouse completed — 225 years old this year
1836 – First Parish become a separate corporation separate from the Town
1837 – Local schism led First Parish to become Unitarian, with the Congregationalist members splitting off to form what is now our Memorial Congregational Church
1846 – Town moves into its own building “Town House” (lost to fire in 1930)
1932 – Present Sudbury Town Hall completed