A meeting house is a building where religious and sometimes public meetings take place.
The Town House of the small Vermont town of Marlboro was built in 1822 to be used for Town Meetings, which had previously been held in private homes. It is still in use today. Nearby is an example of a religious building called a "meeting house", the Marlboro Meeting House Congregational Church.
Old Town Friends Meetinghouse in Baltimore
Buckingham Friends Meeting House in Pennsylvania
Sheep-pen pews, Old Ship Meeting house, Hingham, Massachusetts, ca. 1880
Nonconformist (Protestantism)
Nonconformists were Protestant Christians who did not "conform" to the governance and usages of the state church in England, and in Wales until 1914, the Church of England. In Ireland, the comparable term, through to the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869, was Dissenter: a Protestant, typically a Presbyterian, who refused, or dissented from, the approved Anglican communion.
Title page of a collection of Farewell Sermons preached by Nonconformist ministers ejected from their parishes in 1662.
Bunyan Meeting Free Church, a Nonconformist chapel in Bedford. Dissenter John Bunyan purchased a barn in 1672 for a meeting place. A meeting house replaced it in 1707 and this chapel was built in 1850.
Methodist minister Hugh Price Hughes encouraged Nonconformists to support the Liberal Party.
Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George assiduously cultivated Nonconformist support.
