Within the next month or so, Epsom officials will no longer be forced to meet at a strip mall to conduct the town’s business.

They’ll no longer need to worry about finding parking spaces in a parking lot filled with cars driven by laser-focused parents waiting for their kids to emerge from the plaza’s daycare center.

Soon, these officials will gather in an environment enjoyed by most towns in the Granite State these days: a serviceable Town Hall, a real town hall, with real offices.

The nearby Old Town Meetinghouse, dormant since its relocation down Route 4 more than 16 years ago, and the town’s library give Epsom a municipal center that combines accessibility with town business, reading, and arts and entertainment.

“Using the town’s own historical building is great for the town,” beamed Select Board Chair Virginia Drew, one of the faces behind this plan. “Now we can stop renting space at a shopping center. This was a big project.”

Enormous, actually. Its completion in the next few weeks will cap years of effort, planning and investment. That’s what happens when you move a structure like the 170-year-old Old Meetinghouse, making it part of an overall complex, then have to figure out how to bring it up to modern standards while still painstakingly preserving its historic charm.

Drew said the upstairs community space is nearly finished, and that includes the freshly painted trim around the stained glass windows. Volunteers have installed the heating system on both levels, and the bathrooms are in place downstairs. The food pantry, welfare department and record storage, previously shoehorned into the Old Town Hall, will move to the Meetinghouse’s first floor.

Finding materials and fair prices for labor have slowed recent progress, creating the end of a timeline that has tested the town’s patience before breaking through and surfacing as a real change that would last decades and beyond.

The Town Meetinghouse was built in 1851 and was outdated when Cumberland Farms purchased the property in 2006, where the meetinghouse sat, and offered it to the town. The New Hampshire Preservation Alliance added the meeting house to its list of historic buildings in need of saving.

Epsom accepted the building and raised $85,000 in donations for a simple yet monumental task that year: Moving the Old Town Meetinghouse down Route 4 to a grassy knoll next to the Epsom Town Library and the Old Town Hall.

The transfer, beginning before dawn, was a spectacle: “A big process of moving a building that size and going down Route 4 across both lanes of the road,” remembered Drew, who was there that day 17 years ago. “You had all the utility lines having to be dropped because of the high steeple. It started at 4 in the morning and by 6 a.m. it was entering the driveway to the post where it is now.”

And there it sat, waiting for voters, led by individuals like Drew, to take action. The asking price to build town offices in the Old Town Hall and Meetinghouse, and finish the lower level of the Meetinghouse was about $1.1 million.

The town used $687,690 from unassigned funds and $400,000 would come from federal COVID relief money in the American Rescue Plan Act.

As a final measure, as part of this year’s Town Meeting on March 14 at the Epsom Bible Church, in what is viewed as a formality, voters are expected to pass a warrant article to add $20,000 to an Expendable Trust Fund for the maintenance of town-owned buildings.

“It brings more community focus to our library,” Drew said. “You can stop in to register your car and go into the library for a DVD or a book. Epsom is going to have it all, and it’s about time.”

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