The holiday's of our forefathers were not very numerous. Fast Day was observed as sacredly as the Sabbath. All attended service, where they usually heard a long discourse on the degeneracy of the times. The annual Thanksgiving was kept with thankful hearts. After around the hearth with nuts, apples and cider, for a general good time. Corn-huskings, quiltings, apple-bees, the general muster, and the raising of buildings were occasions of festivity.

At all these gatherings rum, grog and flip circulated freely. The day or evening closed with a liberal supper and a merry dance. The Sabbath was strictly a religious day. The meeting house was without fire. A prayer of an hour and a quarter, and a sermon of two hours were not unusual. About the close of the last century footstoves came into vogue. These were tin boxes, some nine or ten inches square, perforated with holes, and contained an iron pan, which when the stove was in use filled with good, live, har-wood coals from the hearth. These stoves, enclosed in an open frame of wood, were carried by a bail, and it was the custom for the small boys to carry them to church each Sabbath for their mothers and sisters. The present Congregational church at the village was once set on fire and narrowly escaped destruction through the overturning of one of these stoves. Wood stoves were not placed in the meeting house till 1822.

Tithing men were appointed to enforce the laws and also to see that order was preserved in the Lord's house. These men were provided with staves or poles and rapped smartly on the head of the offender caught nodding, or playing in the meeting house. Misdemeanors in church, were sometimes punished by confinement in the stocks. These stood on the green, south of the church. The punishment fell into disuse after some years, and the stocks were thrown aside on the lot across the street. It is said that the last use that was ever made of them was when some graceless boys met a farmer who had come to market, and was rather the worse for liquor. Seeing a chance for sport they pounced upon him, and dragging out the old stocks, fastened him into them, of course to his great rage and mortification when he became sober. The next morning he reappeared in the village with a yoke of oxen, and a chain which he fastened to the stocks, and hauled hem off, and that was the last that was seen of them.

Excerpt From: History of Gorham
Author: Hugh McLellan



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