The Reverend Thomas Smith
The History of the First Parish
in Portland, Maine
Under Rev. Smith's guidance, First Parish was Calvinistic but liberal. The Half-Way Covenant (which provided partial church membership for the children and grandchildren of members) was recognized and the usual requirement of public testimony of conversion was specifically excluded. The parish was enormous, including modern Portland, South Portland, Cape Elizabeth, Falmouth, and Westbrook. The necessity to travel by foot, horseback, boat, and snowshoe was difficult but Reverend Smith appeared to thrive on it. In one period of 13 months, he traveled 3,000 miles on horseback, including four trips to Boston.
Rev. Smith also cared for the physical health of his widely scattered parishioners. Undoubtedly, his free medical services made him welcome even in irreligious homes. For many years he was the only physician in the region, and he was known to swap cures with the leading medical men of Boston. In September 1728, he married, and the town built an elegant parsonage on Smith’s three acre lot at the head of India Street. This house was long the finest house in Falmouth and the only one with wallpaper.
After his wife’s death in October 1742, Parson Smith quickly remarried in March 1743, perhaps taking the Eighteenth Century view that a quick second marriage is the highest compliment to the memory of the first wife.
His long-winded sermons were legendary. The sermons that have survived are strings of random, plagiarized quotations and are astonishingly dull. It was noted that Smith never learned the popular trick of embellishing his sermons with the “new sciences” and contemporary events as sermon topics.
Reverend Smith was not the sort of man to miss an opportunity for money-making schemes. He enjoyed buying old land titles and going to court to prove them at the expense of the settlers in possession, many of whom were his parishioners. It was an exciting, if not compassionate, gamble from which he derived a comfortable fortune. He also took advantage of the bounty on Indian scalps afforded by the state of Massachusetts. During the French and Indian War he was one of a group of gentlemen who hired a squad of hardy parishioners to go on a “scout or cruise for the killing and captivating of the Indian enemy.” The contract is a shocking document. In his journal along with pious thoughts, Smith records: “June 18, 1757, I receive 165 pounds, my part of scalp money.”
“Old Jerusalem” 1740 – 1825
Despite the Indian Wars, Falmouth continued to grow in population. By 1735 the old meeting house was too small to accommodate the congregation. Some of the more affluent citizens decided to build a more spacious meeting-house for what was now the First Parish over the objections of some that the location was too remote and the expense too great. In 1740, the new meeting-house, Old Jerusalem, was built on the site where First Parish now stands, a 2-story, plain, rectangular shaped meeting house was constructed. The interior as well as part of the exterior remained unfinished for some years, and the whole building was unpainted until after the Revolutionary War.
In 1749, the “Treaty with the Eastern Indians,” which secured a tenuous peace with the Norridgewock Indians, was signed in First Parish’s Meeting House. As the congregation continued to grow, the parish voted in March 1759 to enlarge the meeting house and to erect a steeple. The structure was sawed through on both sides of the pulpit, and 12 feet added to each side providing space for 28 new pews downstairs, and four in the gallery. After completing the lengthening in summer of 1759, Isaac Ilsley, the town’s leading joiner, proceeded to raise the steeple. In June 1761, the completed spire was topped with a weathervane made by Thomas Drowne of Boston. An 800 pound bell was placed in the tower in 1758.
By this time it was becoming evident that pastoral tasks were becoming too much for the aging “Bishop” Smith, as he was affectionately called. A year after the death of his second wife in 1763 Smith was joined by a colleague pastor, the Reverend Samuel Deane. Marrying a third time in 1766, Smith faced his twilight years with relative calm.
During the Revolution, the burning of Falmouth by the British drove Rev. Smith to his son’s home in Windham. In 1784 he was obliged to give up regular preaching, but assisted Deane for 10 more years. Having outlived all of his original parishioners, and having been for five years the oldest living Harvard graduate, he died on May 25, 1795 at the age of 94 in the 69th year of his ministry.
During Reverend Smith’s waning years, additions continued to be made to the meeting-house. By 1791 the bell had cracked; a replacement weighing 1,721 pounds was hung in 1804. In 1794, a Simon Willard tower clock was put in place at the expense of the town. Today, more than 210 years after its installation, that same clock still keeps time in the steeple of this church.
Reverend Deane impressed upon his congregation that they should be concerned more with ethics and less with theology. He had no use for the horrors of Calvinism; he denied the trinity and the orthodox doctrine of atonement, but still did not go as far as the Unitarians. All of this was reflected in his brief, plain, practical sermons. When in his later years he traveled to Harvard to preach, a student by the name of John Quincy Adams complained that Deane spoke with a “whining sort of tone, which would have injured the sermons if they had been good.”
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