ROCKINGHAM-The Rockingham Meeting House has been awarded a National Historic Preservation Grant for $750,000 toward current efforts to preserve the town's first public structure.
The funding is one of 19 awarded in nine states by the National Park Service through its Semiquincentennial Grant Program in honor of the nation's 250th anniversary in 2026.
The town describes the meeting house as "the largest intact [18th-century] public building remaining in Vermont still in its original material form and in active use."
The Meeting House was built as the government of the United States was also taking shape.
The building's frame was raised on June 7, 1787, "14 days after the start of the Philadelphia Convention framing of the U.S. Constitution," Rockingham Historic Preservation Coordinator Walter Wallace told The Commons. "It is a complicated history full of contradiction."
The grant "breathes life into our town's, our region's, and our state's remembrance of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026," Wallace said.
Other 2024 recipients include the San Xavier del Bar, a baroque mission church in Tuscon, Arizona; the Slarrow sawmill in Leverett, Massachusetts, built in 1774; Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain; and George Washington's 1782-83 headquarters.
Created by Congress in 2020 and funded through the Historic Preservation Fund, the grants fund "projects that restore and preserve sites and structures listed on the National Register of Historic Places that commemorate the founding of the nation."
The Meeting House was built from 1787 to 1801 and was also known as the Old North Church and the First Church. It was used for church meetings until 1839, and as a Town Meeting site until it was abandoned in 1869.
The building remained unused until 1906, when local citizens recognized its historic value and began its restoration. It was rededicated in 1907.
The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2000, and is described in its nomination for that designation as "nationally significant as a rare eighteenth century New England meeting house of the 'second period' type, virtually unaltered on the exterior or interior.
"With its associated burial ground, and standing prominently on a rural hill within a locally-designated historic district, the Rockingham Meeting House retains to a high degree its integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association," writes Richard Ewald of Putney, an architectural historian, and Curtis Johnson, a Montpelier historian, in the nomination narrative.
The National Park Service award was obtained through the efforts of Vermont's Congressional delegation - Sens. Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch and Rep. Becca Balint.
Last year, the town also received a $360,000 Save America's Treasures grant through the efforts of Sanders. The town had to match those funds, which it did using Covid economic development money, local donations, help from the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation, and town tax funds.
The delegation released a statement on the importance of the Meeting House: "It's critical we preserve, restore, and expand accessibility of our historic landmarks so every Vermonter and people visiting New England can enjoy historic places like the Old Rockingham Meeting House for generations to come."
The Meeting House, they wrote, "is one of the oldest structures in Vermont and an early site of Town Meeting Day - it's a symbol of our democratic process."
The Meeting House is owned by the town of Rockingham, and is regularly used for concerts, weddings, memorial services, lectures, and civic events.
Restoration goals
Meeting House construction is divided into three phases. Phase I focuses on foundation, drainage, window restoration, and roof work. Phase II focuses on the exterior, plaster, interior, and pew restoration. Phase III focuses on compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and safety measures.
The Project Steering Committee of the Rockingham Meeting House Preservation Project released a statement listing its vision for the historic building.
The initial goals include preserving and restoring the Meeting House foundation, exterior woodwork, plaster, interior woodwork, and pews, adhering to the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties.
A second goal is conserving the important art left by the Rockingham School of stone carvers on grave stones in the adjacent Rockingham Burying Ground.
By preserving the Meeting House, the committee said it hopes to develop and bring focus to "a public history narrative of early Rockingham and Vermont that conveys diverse and underrepresented stories, and spurs preservation of this space."
The committee also wants the preservation work to ensure continued safe use of the building as a museum and for public and private events, and for the community to derive economic benefits from heritage tourism.
The committee also wants to "provide a space to inspire and engage a rising generation to learn and practice architecture, engineering, historic preservation, public history, and the arts of timber framing, traditional carpentry, joinery, and smithing."
Construction for the project, estimated at $3 million, should begin in the summer of 2025 and continue through to 2027.
Local talent, local pride
"We hope to tap into as much local talent as possible to do the construction work: timber-framers, joiners, smiths, and anyone who knows how to rive a 5-foot clapboard," said Wallace, who gave an overview of the historic significance of the Meeting House and its restoration.
"Rockingham had a Committee of Correspondence, keeping in touch with Sam Adams and his merry band in Boston. No doubt there was a Liberty Tree where letters were posted to keep up on news of events that led to the Declaration of Independence, located near the first meeting house, a primitive affair, probably standing where the hearse house now sits.
"The local militia turned out in April 1775," Wallace continued, "to join the Siege of Boston following news of Lexington and Concord. Indeed, the person who donated the land upon which the present meeting house sits - David Pulsipher - was in the militia, mortally wounded at Bunker Hill, never to return to see his vision of the meeting house realized."
Wallace observed that "numerous Revolutionary War Patriots" are buried at the Rockingham Meeting House graveyard.
"Preserving the Meeting House is remembering why it was built and who built it," he said. "The Rockingham Meeting House was born in a revolutionary time when the notions of freedom and liberty and democracy were hotly debated, yet to be resolved and settled."
Discussion in Deerfield
Wallace also noted that the Meeting House's original paint has been studied in recent years and will be a topic at the Historic Deerfield (Massachusetts) 2024 Fall Forum, "A Rich and Varied Palette: Coloring New England's Past."
One of the animations at the event "includes a fiddle soundtrack of a John Colby tune," he said.
"Colby was a country fiddler and Free Will Baptist minister who preached - and no doubt fiddled - at the Meeting House around 1802-1803," Wallace noted.
This News item by Robert F. Smith was written for The Commons. This story has been updated to reflect the correct title of Walter Wallace.