The Bennington Historical Society will present the slide program “Early Churches in Vermont and Beyond” in the Ada Paresky Education Center at the Bennington Museum, at 7:00 P.M. on Thursday, November 15th. It is open to the public free of charge. Light refreshments will be served.

Speaker Ted Atkinson is a long-time guide at Old First Church in Old Bennington and an equally long-time volunteer in the museum’s Research Library. Ted has been a professional genealogist for 20 years and a Congregational minister for 25. His Carpenter forebears, for whom Carpenter Hill is named, arrived in Bennington in the 1760s. Four of them, reportedly, were at the Battle of Bennington on August 16, 1777.

Ted will focus on distinctions between two architectural types: “barn” meetinghouses of the 1700s, and rectangular Georgian churches, built in great numbers after 1800. Ted’s talk will feature examples in Bennington, East Poultney, Middlebury, Rockingham, Strafford, Thetford, and Townsend, as well as in Amesbury, MA, and Spencertown, NY.