also Sunday ditto. One’s best clothes.
1825. His “go-to-meetin’” coat, as they call that, in America, which a farmer wears, on training days, and Sabbath days, had been, some thirty-five years before it came into his possession, of a strong, bright, claret colour.—John Neal, ‘Brother Jonathan,’ i. 148.
1825. Walter, unhappily for him, was rigged out, in all his go-to-meetin’ finery, unhappily, because, he never appeared so like a great, overgrown, awkward country boy, as when he was thus equipped.—Id., ii. 45.
1835. One of those blue-noses, with his go-to-meetin clothes on.—Haliburton, ‘The Clockmaker,’ I. ix. (N.E.D.)
1840. She had begun to fear that she must always wear the same brown cambric bonnet, and that the same calico gown would always be her “go-to-meeting dress.”—‘Lowell Offering,’ i. 2.
1840. Over the chest hung the the wardrobe of the family; the go-to-meeting hats and bonnets, frocks and pantaloons of a goodly number of all sizes.—Mrs. Kirkland, ‘A New Home,’ p. 27.
1848. [The devil] suggested to them the idea of having a ride in the ‘go-to meetin’’ sleigh, with an unbroken steer of the farmer’s for a team.—Durivage and Burnham, ‘Stray Subjects,’ p. 77.
1848. Ther’s a aristocratic air about it, a sort of starchy Sunday-go-to-meetin kind of a look about this part of the city [Boston], that I don’t like a bit better than I do the pinched up, narrow contrived appearance of the rest.—W. T. Thompson, ‘Major Jones’s Sketches of Travel,’ p. 128 (Phila.).
1850. She tuk off her shoe, and the way a number ten go-to-meetin’ brogan commenced givin’ a hoss particular Moses, were a caution to hoss-flesh—but still it kept nose and nose.—H. C. Lewis (‘Madison Tensas’), ‘Odd Leaves,’ p. 52 (Phila.).
1850. The girls, you may be sure, had on their ‘go-to-meeting’ clothes.—Knick. Mag., xxxv. 24 (Jan.).
1851. I pulled off my ole Sunday-go-to-meetin’ coat, an’ slammed it down on er stump.—‘Polly Peablossom’s Wedding,’ &c., p. 151.
1854. He said they were ‘the most dry, and unsociable set of people he had ever seen, when they had got on their Sunday-go-to-meeting faces.’—Knick. Mag., xliii. 650 (June).
