East Alton Meetinghouse gets restoration grant

The East Alton Meeting House Society has been awarded a $7,000 grant by the New Hampshire Land and Community Heritage Investment Program’s (LCHIP) to advance the group’s efforts to restore and preserve the historic structure.

Sandy Hammond, president of the society, said yesterday the organization would use the money to get an in-depth engineering study of the meeting house.

“As near as we can figure the Meeting House was built around 1810 and it has been at various states of looking nice and in disrepair over the years,” she said. “In the 1970s some neighbors got together and did some fundraising for it, and they did a little rehab on it. It kind of perked it up.”

More recently small donations have helped keep the white clapboard structure painted, she said.

“This past spring we got a mini-grant (of $500) from the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance to have an engineering assessment done,” the president said. “We were worried about the foundation. There’s no cellar – it’s just sitting on some granite slabs, this big pieces of old granite. It seems to be damp around there and we’re getting worried.”

The assessment helped the society prioritize work that’s needed “structurally and foundation-wise,” Hammond said.

“And as soon as we got that — we’d been in contact with the LCIP people so we investigated and decided to go and make an application to LCHIP for their seventh round (of grants),” she said. “So we’ve got $7,000 more do a more in-depth (engineering) assessment.

“We’re going to get estimates of costs so we have a good idea of what we’re looking at for fundraising,” she added.

Over the last three years the society has independently raised $10,000 to repair 12 meetinghouse windows that were damaged. “What started this was some red squirrels got in and couldn’t find their way back out,” Hammond reported. “They chewed every single window — it was horrible! And when the putty (on the windows) dries out it becomes brittle and you start losing your glass. And some of these windows are very large.”

However the broken windows were initially replaced with new glass — “which stood right out and were like, blah!” Hammond laughed.

Alton glassmaker Stephen Decater recently replaced the new glasses with ones that were created using traditional methods.

“We were able to get them in just in time for the annual meeting in August,” the president said. “And everyone was so impressed with the old glass. Because it’s wavy, when the sun comes through it sparkles like a diamond.”

The East Alton Meeting House measures about 2,340-square-feet. The wooden building, which has an asphalt shingle roof, served as both a community meeting place and a church building for the Free Will Baptist Church.

“It’s a historic area,” Hammond said of the neighborhood. “A lot of the original settlers settled there back in the 1600s. There were a couple of other communities like it, one of them off Route 28 south of the (traffic) circle. Then they (people) migrated back towards the water area, especially during the Civil War.”

The structure itself is a “very picturesque New England meeting house,” Hammond said, visible only about one-quarter mile at Gilman’s Corner, intersection of Gilman Corner Road and Drew Hill Road.

After the interest of neighbors in the structure was revived the 1970s, the society was formed and restoration work began. The building is now painted regularly and the exterior is decorated with wreaths on its two front doorways and electric candles in its windows at Christmastime. Not long ago, electricity was installed. Besides the society’s annual meeting and vesper service, it’s regularly used during warm weather for weddings, baptisms and other meetings.