The Shell Meetinghouse Cemetery is located near the intersection of Hackleboro Road with Baptist Hill Road and is also on the corner of an old Class VI road known by various names including, “Shell Meetinghouse Road,” “Horse & Sleigh Road,” or “Horse & Carriage Road.” This old road was named after the Shell Meetinghouse Church which once stood where the cemetery is today and for the horses pulling carriages or sleighs bringing meeting goers to religious services or town meetings held in the church.

In the late 1700s, new settlers were arriving in Canterbury and building homes away from the fort and the town’s center. The lack of roads made it challenging for settlers living on the east side of Canterbury to attend church services or town meetings being held in the town center. These residents protested that although they were being taxed to support preaching, they received little benefit from it because of the distance they were from the services and the difficulty in getting to them, especially in winter. East side residents petitioned the town to build another meeting house in the northeast part of town at a town meeting in 1789, but the vote failed to gather a majority. Perhaps in a spirit of compromise in 1790, the town voted to hold a meeting for preaching in the east part of the town on every fourth Sunday, likely to be held in a private home. In 1791 the town voted to build a meeting house in the east part of the town and to set it “at the crossroads to the south of Samuel Jackson’s house.” The structure was to be, “the same bigness … of the old meeting house and a little higher.”

This new meeting house was raised, boarded, and the roof shingled within a year. The 1792 Town Meeting was then held in this newly constructed building. At that meeting it was further voted to sell pews on the first floor of the meetinghouse, and to build a porch entryway onto the front of it.  The porch was to be constructed so that interior stairs to the upper-level loft gallery would be contained inside this entrance vestibule. Efforts were made to finish the church but for years the town struggled to raise the funds to complete the desired work. In 1808 a vote was proposed to hold half of all town meetings in this new meeting house. The vote however was defeated probably by the majority of residents who lived closer to the town center.

Completion of the dual-purpose public meeting house and church was never fully realized. Final siding, interior finish work, construction of pews, and the exterior entrance vestibule never came to fruition. Only the basic ‘shell’ of the structure was ever built, leading to the unusual moniker of, “The Shell Meetinghouse.” Despite construction not being finished, religious services were held in the shell of the building for several years. A small cemetery was established behind the Church for the interment of parishioners. Town meetings were also occasionally held in the building. Lyford’s History of Canterbury tells the story of an elderly woman describing her youthful recollection of attending a function in this meetinghouse with a vivid memory of an old man using a cane and thumping across the unfinished and loose floorboards which clumped and rattled as the old man hobbled to his seat.

In 1793, despite the unfinished condition of the building, the Free Will Baptists asked permission of the town to use this shell of a building for their religious services. The town voted not to grant the Baptists leave to bring their minister into this meeting house. Six years later the Baptists asked a second time and were denied once again, leading them to construct their own church building on the corner of what today we call Baptist Road and Baptist Hill Road.

The unfinished shell of the Shell Meetinghouse had apparently fallen into disrepair by 1815 as the town appointed a committee to study the building and make recommendations of what to do with it. The committee recommended that the town hold a public auction and sell off what remained of it. Legend says that before it could be auctioned off, the structure was blown down during a strong windstorm. The framework and salvageable boards were then used for the construction of horse sheds that were once attached to the Town Hall. These horse sheds burned in the great fire that consumed much of the town center in 1943 and the last known remnants of the old Shell Meetinghouse were gone. The small cemetery behind the old meeting house church remained and was expanded to include the spot on which the Shell Church had once stood, leaving no trace of the old building.

Exactly how many years the Shell Meetinghouse provided an enclosed shelter for church services and town meetings is unknown, as is the year of the building collapse. The cemetery, however, continued to be actively used up until the early 1900s when interments ceased probably because of the shallow depth to ledge and hard digging. Town Clerk records indicate that between 1899 and 1920, eight loved ones were interred there. The last one of record being Nancy M. Foster who died on September 20, 1920. Headstone dates however suggest the last interment was Elijah H. Knowles who died in December of 1909. In 2023 Cemetery Trustees resumed the interment of cremains in this old cemetery. Make plans to visit this cemetery at the crossroads and imagine the horses pulling carriages bringing parishioners to the shell of the church meeting house that once stood here.

~ Mark Stevens