This meeting house, now a National Historic Site, was built as both a religious structure and a community hall, housing both Sunday services and community meetings and elections. A relatively simple clapboard sided wood frame building, it is one of the oldest surviving buildings in English speaking Canada. It is also the
oldest nonconformist house of worship in Canada. As well as the Congregationalists, the meeting house was used initially by all denominations in the area until other churches were constructed.
Beside the meeting house is a mill stone, mounted on a low concrete plinth and bearing a plaque which commemorates the bicentennial of the settling of the Cape Sable region of Nova Scotia. The millstone was originally used in a mill, probably a flour mill, on the Barrington River.
The plaque:
In commemoration of the 200th anniversary
of the settlement of Cape Sable region of
Nova Scotia in 1761 by a few families from
Cape Cod and Nantucket, this stone, from
an early mill at Barrington River, is
dedicated as a monument to the men and
women upon whose courage and fortitude
in the face of great hardship and adversity
our community was founded.
In the late twentieth century the meeting house was rescued from possible demolition, restored and converted to a museum, The
Old Meeting House Museum. Today it is managed by the Cape Sable Historical Society on behalf of the Nova Scotia Museum. Adjacent is the old cemetery.