The Details:
First Church, Salem, Massachusetts. A Copy of the Church-Covenants which Have Been Used in the Church of Salem … Boston: John Foster, 1680. [catalog record]
Gift of Thomas Wallcut, 1834.
The Story:
We owe to Thomas Wallcut’s decades of collecting, and Christopher Columbus Baldwin’s hasty but informed culling of the Wallcut accumulation, the existence of many early American imprints which otherwise would not have survived. One is this unique copy of the earliest separately printed American church covenant—the document by which Puritan congregations bound themselves to God’s word, and to each other, when establishing a church.
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Job Weeden (Salem) in Case 5
