By GLYNIS HART
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GOSHEN — The town of Goshen accepted a grant from New Hampshire’s Conservation License Plates program to repair the foundation of the Grange, and a desk crafted by one of the building’s original designers has been gifted to the historical society.
The building, originally built in 1851, started as a Christian Chapel and over a century and a half has served the community in several incarnations: as a Methodist church (after being moved from Rands Pond Road) and after the Civil War as a Grange. It began as a one-story building, which was lifted and a second story built underneath. In later years, the Goshen community has been serving the building rather than the other way around, through a series of community efforts to save and renovate the building.
“We are a small town of about 900 people,” said Sandy Sonnichsen, a member of the Goshen Historical Society. “To preserve a historic building just for it to be pretty is beyond our reach.”
Sonnichsen envisions the Grange serving the town again, with the town offices to move to the first floor of the building after a septic system and modern, ADA-compliant facilities have been installed.
When the Mt. Sunapee Grange disbanded in 2002, they offered the building to the town. However, the select board was reluctant to accept it if it were going to be costly, so community members offered volunteer labor to repair and maintain it, forming the Friends of the Grange.
“The late Fred Wood spearheaded the effort,” said Bea Jillette. “He donated the repair of the windows. He repaired them, he didn’t replace them.”
The fact that Wood restored the windows to their original state was key in getting future grants, said Sonnichsen. That, and the effort the Goshen community put into saving the building: flea markets, bake sales, and even calendar sales. It was clear the building had community support.
The good men of Goshen even posed for a nude calendar in 2003, causing a flurry of letters to local papers by citizens concerned this signaled a precipitous drop in morals.
“It was our best-selling calendar,” said Jillette.
During a clean-out of the Grange, the Friends found two painted theater curtains depicting scenes from Hillsborough. The Friends and the Hillsborough Historical Society worked together to clean the historic curtains, and one curtain was returned to Hillsboro with pomp and circumstance.
“Hillsborough sent their fire truck,” Jillette recalled. “Of course, the curtains were very long. You couldn’t just put them in an ordinary truck.”
The Grange has received two Conservation License Plate grants — one that helped replace the roof, another to stabilize the retaining wall between the building and the Sugar River — and a grant from the New Hampshire Preservation Association for architectural plans for preservation of the building.
This week, another grant has been accepted, around $9,000 to the Grange to renovate the building’s foundation.
In another fortuitous development, the Goshen Historical Society has just received a high-top desk built and used by Eleazar Farr, a Baptist minister and cabinet maker who helped design and build the Grange in 1853. Farr, who later moved away and became a doctor, returned to Goshen at the close of his life, presumably bringing his desk with him. Farr moved in with his married daughter, whose last name was Nelson. He is Beatrice Jillette’s great-great-grandfather.
The desk stayed in the historic Gunnison House on Center Road after the last descendant of the Nelson family sold it to Sherman and Janet O’Brian, who bought the house.
“Janet just last week sold the house and donated the desk to the Goshen Historical Society,” said Jillette. “We accepted it under the agreement it will revert back to the Nelson family if the town or the historical society doesn’t want it.”
The old desk bespeaks Farr’s medical occupation, with a row of pigeonholes above a slanted writing surface; Jillette supposes Farr might have been left-handed, because the writing surface has more wrist room on the left. A second section that sits on the top of the desk was once Farr’s medical cabinet.
If all goes well, the desk will be settled in the Grange as part of an Historic Society collection, which would be on the second floor. The first floor could offer a meeting place for the community and a better site for select board meetings.
“We need it,” said Sonnichsen.
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