WILLIAMSVILLE — I live in the village of Williamsville, three miles south of Newfane's center. At the turn of the nineteenth century, when the Rock River turned wheels to generate power, Williamsville was the hub of local industry. It was also a farming community.
My house, built 20 years ago, is situated in the corner of a 60-acre parcel that was once a combination of pasture and hayfield. There are still lots of barns in Williamsville, some open fields, and a couple of small farms, but no dairies.
In living memory, there was a school, two stores, two churches, and an active Grange. In 1969, the Grange closed and deeded the hall to the town.
When the Williamsville Hall was built in 1910, Grange Number 389 boasted more than 100 dues-paying members. Right through mid-century, it held meetings the second and fourth Friday of the month, and it was where men, women, and youth came together “to promote the material welfare of the farm and the farmer and to increase the privileges and happiness of the rural home.”
The Williamsville Grange was a chapter of a national organization, one of whose goals was to promote “a better community life,” according to a pamphlet titled “Information for the New Grange Member.” The Williamsville Grange achieved this with bimonthly lectures, suppers, dances, and amateur theatricals.
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When I moved to Williamsville, at the end of the twentieth century, the village still hosted a general store that sold gas, a church that held services, and a one-room post office inside a private home.
The first thing to go after I moved here was the gas pump. The owner of the store couldn't afford to make the mandatory upgrade to the underground tank, so he pulled it. Then he sold the store.
For a while, the new owner ran a really good deli – the sort of place people from away would come just to buy lunch – and also the place where locals would gather. The store has been shuttered for years now, forcing us locals to loiter outside the post office to conduct the important business of sharing news.
Even though the P.O. has been housed in the same building for the past 50 years, it's no longer a private residence, but a regulation postal service outpost, with standard issue décor. And with too few parishioners to support it, the Little Brown Church closed and the building recently sold.
The village center is about a half mile long, and bracketed on each side by a single-lane bridge. One of the bridges is covered; the other is a cement arch. Both are falling apart.
A new covered bridge will soon replace the old one [The Commons, July 7]; it's not yet certain what will happen to the cement arch. In recent history, bridge replacement has been a contentious issue is the village, where speeding motorists have degraded pedestrian life, and where weight limits have detoured delivery trucks onto formerly quiet back roads.
There was a time when Williamsville was a destination, not just a community convenient to Brattleboro. The stagecoach stopped here, and then the train. Not everyone who lives here commutes, and even those who do commute still engage in civic life when home.
For residents of Williamsville, that civic life has taken up residence in the former Grange.
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The Williamsville Hall, as it is now called, is owned by the town of Newfane and maintained by a committee of volunteers, appointed by the Selectboard. The committee has been the moving force behind renovations that have gradually improved the building enough so that it can again be safely used.
Newfane's Town Meeting takes place there every other year; a senior meal is served at the hall on the fourth Thursday of the month; the hall is the site of the hugely popular Williamsville Seder and an annual talent show. The hall is also rented out for private functions.
In a village like Williamsville, where both the traditional commercial and spiritual buildings are out of business, the hall offers the potential for a new community center - a place where people can gather informally (the way they used to at the store) or with a degree of pomp and ritual (as they once did at the church).
The committee is now working toward a plan for making this plain building a center of community life once again: the hall would open several afternoons and/or evenings a week, pending Selectboard approval.
The idea is to have a place where villagers could gather informally, drink coffee, access wi-fi, play Ping-Pong, watch movies, learn crafts, sing. The possibilities are nearly endless, and the social capital huge.
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When Grange Number 389 dwindled to a close in the 1960s, members blamed it on TV. The hall's website (www.williamsvillehall.com) quotes the late Lillian Thayer remarking, “The hall was used for many activities, which have been given up since the television has taken over.”
Since then, of course, we've isolated ourselves further by plugging into our private soundtracks, watching movies on our laptops, and talking on our cell phones to people somewhere else. Between these technologies and our willingness to drive everywhere, it is no wonder our sense of the local has been jeopardized - and our sense of place in the world threatened.
The Grange was founded to promote “the welfare of the rural people.” For more than 50 years, the Williamsville Grange did just that in this small village wedged along the Rock River, in the Williamsville Hall, built by Grange 389, which turns 100 this year.
There will be a celebration this weekend, with a birthday party for the building on Saturday night. Even though Grange 389 is defunct, its legacy of improving community life for a rural population lives on.