Edmond Town Hall Tells Our Story

Four people perched on four-legged stools under stage lights earnestly explaining what they would do for the future of Newtown. Each hoped eventually to exchange that uncomfortable seat for the more comfortable accommodations in the first selectman’s office. Meanwhile, a small crowd of spectators lounged in the theater shadows in varying states of skepticism and enthusiasm, swaddled in well-padded seats, their attention drifting through the occasional rhetorical rough spots to the blank white dome above them, pondering what their ceiling masterpiece might be if they were a Michelangelo.

It was debate night Monday at Edmond Town Hall; just one more in a succession of 79 years of days and nights that people will remember… and eventually forget. We would like to think that the old building remembers everything that ever happened in its warren of large and small spaces. But that is a human conceit; buildings are concerned only with time and gravity and do not care about what we do inside them. When it comes to a landmark structure with a small town history like Edmond Town Hall, it is probably more accurate to say that the building inhabits us rather than the other way around. The antic adolescent first-date chatter by the downstairs soda machine, the crushing ignominy of getting picked last in a pickup game of three-on-three with younger guys in the gym, the blessed marriage license slipped across the town clerk’s counter — the town hall has set the scene for these and so many other chapters in everyone’s Newtown story.

This jewel box gift from our collective wealthy spinster aunt, Mary Hawley, exhaled a cloud of political appurtenance this week as municipal officials, and their attendant aides and assistants, official seals and papers, and special office apparatus migrated to Fairfield Hills, taking up residence in the newly named Newtown Municipal Center. (No one had the heart to call it a town hall.)

We cannot say for certain what Mary Hawley’s ambitions were. She certainly had no interest in becoming Newtown’s most notable historical figure. She was not a very social person, especially after an ill-fated romantic adventure abroad and her humiliating return to Newtown. Her inherited wealth secured her comfortable seclusion on Main Street. In Mary Hawley’s later years, her friend, confidant, and architect of her legacy, Arthur Nettleton, took her aside and suggested that she might have something to contribute to the future of her town. With Mr Nettleton’s guidance and encouragement, she set in motion a series of bequests — Hawley School, the Booth Library, and a town hall named for her great grandfather — that forever marked Newtown as a different kind of place. She laid the cornerstone of Edmond Town Hall in 1929, not long before her death.

We can now say that this particular gift to the future from Mary Hawley has enriched our past. Even stripped of its official standing as our seat of local government, as it was this week, Edmond Town Hall remains as Newtown’s most impressive landmark. It continues to tell our story, not only on the stunning and serpentine staircase mural by David Merrill, but in the rich patina applied by generations of Newtowners weaving their remembered stories through its halls.

We want to believe that Edmond Town Hall, like its aging benefactress, still has some surprises for us. Now, more than ever, we need a Nettleton to take us aside to advise that, like distracted dreamers in the theater, we still have a masterpiece to paint.