Recreating Edmond Town Hall

Any anthropologist will tell you that communities arise where lives intersect. It is not just the intersection of roads, or the river crossing, or the pass through the mountains that determined where our towns and cities are located. It was the people interacting with each other in those places that created first the sense and then the fact of community. And there are places within communities where the same dynamic is at work, not creating a town, but recreating and strengthening the town by bringing people together. Edmond Town Hall is such a place.

Newtown’s benefactress Mary Hawley laid the cornerstone to the town hall she named after her great-grandfather in a formal ceremony in 1929 and did not live to see its completion the following year. We wonder if she understood before she died just how much her gift to the community would bestow the gift of community on Newtown. This building has been consecrated not in a formal ceremony but over the course of 76 years by countless lives passing through the place, watching movies in the theater, taking oaths in the town clerk’s office, registering complaints in the selectmen’s office, competing in the gym (and the bowling alley), testifying in the court room, dancing in the Alexandria Room, posting letters in the old post office, awaiting fate in the police holding cell, and sitting through endless meetings in the hall’s various rooms and chambers.

Edmond Town Hall has been delivered to us from 1930 by successive generations of volunteers serving on the Edmond Town Hall Board of Managers. Over the years, this small board — just half a dozen members — has seen its challenge grow. The building’s maintenance and capital costs have long since overwhelmed the resources of Mary Hawley’s trust for the building. With the Town of Newtown turning its interest and attention to new facilities at Fairfield Hills, the board of managers is now faced with sustaining the building with bricks and mortar and with a renewed sense of purpose.

As we have seen with the recent drive by the Lions Club to furnish the theater with new seats, ordinary people can find plenty of reasons in their own personal histories to come forward to preserve the place where so many memories reside. There are many more projects waiting in the wings at Edmond Town Hall, and, we hope, many more Newtowners willing to step forward to preserve this landmark and to contribute ideas and energy for giving it a new life as a community and cultural center.

The board of managers hopes to get more citizens involved in securing the future of Edmond Town Hall through study and advisory committees or even a group of “friends” similar to the Friends of the C.H. Booth Library. If we are lucky, Miss Hawley’s treasured gift to Newtown will inspire even more lives to intersect to once again recreate and strengthen this icon of our community. To see what you can do to help, call the board of managers’ office at 270-4285.