News From Friends of Old Ship



The summer got off to an early start for The Friends of the Old Ship Meeting House. In mid-May the group organized a trip to New York City to see a replica of the Meeting House’s magnificent vaulted roof that has been the centerpiece of a gallery in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art since the opening of that exhibition space in 1924.

Eleven people, including Friends and members of the Hingham Historical Society, enjoyed a tour of the recently renovated and reopened American Wing by assistant curator Nick Vincent, who described with great enthusiasm the Met’s stunning collection of replicated rooms – which often include actual materials and artifacts – from historic homes around the country.

A goal of the renovation was to make the wing more accessible than it had been. That has been accomplished largely with the addition of a glass elevator, which whisks visitors quickly up to the third floor so that they might view the exhibition chronologically to better understand the development of American domestic architecture and interior design in the New World, from the late 1600s, when Old Ship was built, to the early 1900s, represented by the “Frank Lloyd Wright Room.”

The Old Ship replica is an impressive accomplishment. Smaller than its inspiration, the roof nevertheless directs eyes upward to where one can appreciate the skill and devotion of the farmers who built the original in 1681. Constructed also of pine and oak its patina has the same warm glow. Most important it makes real for the Met’s legions of visitors a time scarcely thought of today and the continuum in which all Americans share.

A wonderful outcome of the Friends’ trip to New York was the contact made with Amelia Peck, curator of American Decorative Arts at the Met, who with her husband recently visited Old Ship to see for the first time the real thing. Passing her hands over the sturdy beams that have held up the great roof for 328 years, Park marveled at the precision of these gently-curved supports and the numbers written on them so long ago by the builders so they would know where each went in the great edifice.

For an onlooker, it was a joy to hear Park chat eagerly and knowledgably with Minister Ken Read Brown and Old Ship historian Marty Saunders about this treasure, which has been described on more than one occasion as “the most perfect example of early Colonial architecture in America.”