Not to sound like an old crank, but I miss the old town meeting places. The wainscoting, the drapes from a different era, the dark wood floors – even the old man in the plaid shirt, pipe in hand, in front of the old pot-bellied stove.
Another town meeting season ends today, and I know the pot-bellied men in front of the pot-bellied stoves are no more, that they belong to the last century. But I saw and photographed those events back in the 1980s and ’90s all across the region. Those meeting places have been replaced by gymnasiums and auditoriums. Growing populations have forced town officials to find bigger venues to hold voters – Hopkinton Town Hall replaced by the high school is just one example.
But there are exceptions: Warner, Sutton, Salisbury and Wilmot are among the towns that still hold their annual meetings in the small, quaint venues.
I am not the only one who laments the change. Staff photographer Elizabeth Frantz is half my age and knows the challenge of finding fresh views in a vanilla setting.
“When town meeting season starts, I try to look at its repetitiveness as a photographic challenge. How do I make all these meetings look different?”
But the gymnasium setting can get in the way of this quest for a new perspective.
“They have all blurred into one generic yellow-floored room with the same patriotic striped curtains hanging over white voting booths,” she said.
It’s the older buildings that offer the deeper connections. I walked into the Wilmot Town Hall on voting day and left feeling like a rock star. All the town officials and townspeople made me feel so welcome. The same at Salisbury, where people stayed after the 40-minute town meeting just to catch up with their neighbors.
Frantz summed it up this way: “Assignments at the smaller, historic town halls and granges are like breaths of fresh air. The buildings are full of character and the settings intimate. The colors are different and windows let in the natural light. The yearly routines and familiarities between residents are the same, from town to town, but the history of those buildings emphasized acts of democracy in ways a gymnasium never can.”
Indeed.
(Geoff Forester is the Monitor’s photo editor.)