Restoration -- Middle years

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T he Middle Years

The Dark Ages

    From the Dark Ages, comes rebirth

    I tend to think of the period from 1990 - 1993 as our dark years. We wanted to restore the hall but we simply did not know how to go about doing it. Remember, we were and are still a small group; less than 35 people with some of us advanced in age and other members being merely names on our membership page. No one had ever tackled anything like this before. We came together once a month to hold our meetings about various topics pertaining to the civil war and then go home until next month with little to do with the hall or our group in between.

    I remember we were having trouble with our new furnance, the old one having giving up the ghost not to long ago. Not a cheap item to replace, it had no doubt drained the coffers of the Hall and now the new one wasn't doing much better. And to add to it all, our aged refridgerator took this opporunity to die and go to refrigerator heaven or some such place as refridgerators go once they decide not to refridgerate any more.

    We were fortunate to have one member, Bill Rolfe, who is no longer with the camp, donate a refridgerator and the problem with the Furnace turned out to be water leaking in from the outside into the oil thereby spoiling it. I know, I know, you're thinking "so what!"; but, these were the little problems we faced. These were the small setbacks that kept us from addressing the problem at hand : That our hall was literally rotting away and there was nothing we could do about it.
    The overhang of the roof had deteriorated to the point that we now had a fairly large hole that allowed the birds to come in. Putting screen over the whole would do no good because one by one, the panes of glass in the attic dormer windows were falling out onto the attic floor and down to the ground outside the building giving the birds easy access to the inside. Then the water started leaking into the building eventually finding its way even to the lower hall's ceiling and walls. Water stains started to show on the upper hall's ceiling under were the glassless windows were in th attic. Things never looked so grim.

    Beginning sometime in 1991 - 1992, we began the process of getting our hall on the state register of historic places and thence on the National Register in the hope that this would lead to our getting some funding to help with the restoration process.

    Then, in 1993, one Dick Carpenter came upon the scene, and things were never quite the same...

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