Pulled down in the night

What happened

In 1718 several hundred Ulster Presbyterians landed at Boston and met a cold welcome. Most were sent on to the frontier, and about fifty families settled in Worcester. There the town's Puritans made them join the established church and taxed them to pay for it. The Presbyterians petitioned for relief, and the town turned them down. So the Scots did what dissenters do: they began to build a meetinghouse of their own on the west side of the Boston road. They brought the timber to the site, framed it and raised it, and then one night, as Perry put it, the English Puritans and their hangers-on gathered tumultuously, leveled the structure with the ground, sawed the timbers and burned or carried off the pieces. Worcester's historians place the night in 1740, though Lincoln's history of 1837 has it in 1719. Rothbard's version is brief: when the Scots began to build their own church, the Puritans destroyed the building (CiL, p. 553). The hapless Scots were then forced to move to the more remote western frontier, where they founded Warren and Blandford. Rothbard ties the persecution to religious hatred, ethnic feeling and the fear of competition.