Carefully sliding back a glass door, Tara Gunnigle removed several carved items from a case inside the Webster Meeting House on Monday. At the end of each tool – resembling bone but actually made of wood – was a intricately designed number.
These were once rudimentary branding devices, Gunnigle explained, to keep track of sheep roaming Webster’s fields and even the slopes of Mount Kearsarge.
“The farmers would share fields so in order to find which sheep were yours, you’d melt tar,” she said. Like a stamp, the branding tools were dipped into tar, and then transferred onto the woolly romp of a farmer’s sheep.
Though sheep no longer freely graze the wilds of Webster, tidbits of the town’s history were alive and well Monday night. Present-day select board members donned 18th-century hats, vests and in Nanci Schofield’s case, a colonial dress, for their regular meeting to highlight Webster Meeting House’s 225th anniversary this year.
Sitting in the middle of the meeting house and surrounded by old farm tools, decades of annual reports and a cheese press, Webster select board chairman Bruce Johnson said, “A building built by local craftsmen in 1791 . . . it was originally called Westerly Meeting House.” Explaining why the second meeting house – erected in a day – was built in what was then the town of Boscawen, he added, “Residents complained about having to travel five whole miles to the meeting house in Boscawen.”
Eventually, the meeting house was designated to Webster when the town was created in 1860, where it has remained ever since.
The 225th birthday of the old, wooden, electricity-free building happens to coincide with a renewed effort by the Webster Historical Society to maintain better record of the town’s past.
“We’ve just kind of revamped it,” Gunnigle, the society’s vice president, said.
For the past six months, about a dozen historical society members have begun a fundraiser to renovate the meeting house, are in the process of setting up headquarters in the old fire station across the street and are trying to get the word out in the meantime.
In conjunction with this year’s Old Home Week, which begins this weekend, the Webster Meeting House will be open each day Saturday though Aug. 26 for local visitors. On Sunday, it will also host a 10 a.m. worship service as well as a 1 p.m. talk by Atkinson photographer Paul Wainwright, who has made a study of New England colonial meetinghouses.
All of these efforts, historical society member Barbara Maki said, are to increase local interest in Webster’s history and, hopefully, to encourage donations toward renovating the meeting house, which is in need of new siding and window repairs.
A GoFundMe page is asking for contributions toward a $50,000 goal.
“It’s hard to do a fund drive without having people have access to it,” Maki said. Aside from the open doors during Old Home Week, she said volunteers have already been keeping the meeting house open Sundays for any interested visitors.
“We need benefactors coming in, more people contributing artifacts so we can display them,” Maki said. Eventually, she added, the meeting house would like to rotate exhibits.
“We have great ambitions, but we’re a small society,” she said. “We’re looking for new members.”
Maki said the society is hoping for more help, donations and residents digging out old artifacts in their dusty barns. In addition to the immediate projects of cataloguing all the items in the Hy-Mar fire station, where it now has headquarters, and the meeting house renovations, the historical society would like to fix up and display the various items in its carriage house – a hay presser, several carriages and 9-foot mast wheels.
“All it takes,” Maki said, “is money, money, money.”
(Elodie Reed can be reached at 369-3306, ereed@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @elodie_reed.)