The simple lines and unusual masonry of a 19th century church bind a community.
This piece first appeared in The Vermont Standard.
Hazel King lives in the house that her ancestors built in South Reading over 200 years ago. Behind the family homestead and across the yard, lies another legacy of a tiny village of long ago, the Old Stone Church. Its physical body is formed from a straightforward rectangle, 44 by 54 feet, faced in slabs of grey stone. The long sides are cut by unadorned windows that run from the structure’s darker stone base up 15 feet or so, nearly to the roofline. A white clapboard belfry and shingled spire perch overhead. The front, with its terraced stoop, tidy windows, and modest wreath-hung doors is like the unblemished countenance of an affable, forthright friend.
King has come to value the simple beauty of the church and what that structure represents. “When I was five and six years old, we were taught there by the people of the town, and we had our first lessons about Christianity,” she says, “that was a family outside of the one I was born to.” And so she thinks of the Old Stone Church as part of the glue that bonds South Reading, and as a symbol of the work, both physical and spiritual, of those who built and maintained it.
The little hamlet where the church rests is hidden among the farms and hills and forests south of Woodstock. The drive from Vermont Route 106, three miles to the east, runs up Tyson Road along the north branch of the Black River, past one of Vermont’s most celebrated swimming holes, the ‘twenty foot’ pools. The approach from the west on a clear blue-skied day is spectacular; as Bartley road gently descends into the village, the monadnock of Mount Ascutney rises to 3100 feet on the eastern horizon.
Reading, comprised together of the little towns of Felchville, Hammondsville, South Reading, and the nearly 27,000 acres surrounding them, was incorporated in 1761. The earliest settlers came to the South Reading part some twenty years later. By the mid-19th century the community had a sprinkling of farms, a starch factory, a map printing business, a tannery, a blacksmith, and a couple of mercantile stores and nearby mills.
The place of worship now called The Old Stone Church was erected in 1844 as a non-denominational gathering place for people of all faiths. Thirty-three subscribers to the South Reading Meeting House Association anted $1255, some in cash and some in materials or labor, to fund its construction. The contributions reflected a community spirit. While long time resident Ebenezer Robinson was the single largest contributor and together he and his three sons fronted a third of the cost, the church was built mostly with the $10 or $20 or $30 that came from the other families of the town. Two South Reading businessmen, Rufus Buck and Lewis Robinson (son of Ebenezer), deeded over the necessary land.
Another local, Washington Keyes, developed the plans for the church. He wasn’t an architect or engineer, but, according to late historian Gilbert Davis, he was an “energetic and prosperous farmer” in his early forties, raised in South Reading, a sometime legislator, and son-in-law of the elder Robinson.
While the physical form of Keyes’ design projects an image of functional simplicity, the stone walls of the church, are, in fact, complex and unusual.
They were formed using a technique called snecked ashlar, with the ‘ashlar’ referring to the slabs of hewn stone visible on the walls’ exterior, and ‘snecked’ describing the method for setting them. Three and four foot expanses of roughly trimmed slabs were placed vertically on edge and then stabilized with smaller flats set horizontally between them, probably through to another ashlar or field stone interior wall. Use of this masonry technique in Vermont was reportedly limited almost exclusively to southern Windsor County, in the mid 19th century, perhaps because of the availability of narrow ledges of gneiss and mica schist in the area. Some sources suggest that the stones in the South Reading church were set by local masons, others propose that the work was done by itinerant Canadians or immigrants from Scotland, where the technique originated.
In any case, construction of the Old Stone Church was completed in under a year. The Meeting House Association then sold its pews at auction and annually meted out Sunday occupancy to various denominations in proportion to their ownership.
In early years, all denominations apparently co-existed without incident. In 1894, however, the Methodists aspired to seize control. Through the efforts of their newly minted pastor, Moses B. Parounagain, an amiable and articulate native of Armenia, they succeeded. The Old Stone Church has been affiliated with the Methodists since then.
For over 140 years, the daily peal of the church’s bell filled the surrounding fields and farms. “I remember [back] in the 1930’s when I loved to be with my grandfather on his farm,” says King, who spent much of her childhood in South Reading, “when the old bell was rung at noon, the horses knew it was lunchtime and headed for the barn.” One seasonal resident particularly loved the regular music of the bell. After Old Stone Church benefactor Ethel Roosevelt Derby, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, passed away in 1977 a plaque in her honor was mounted on the church’s rear interior wall. “May this bell ring ‘as long as winds blow and waters flow,’” it says, perhaps referencing the verse of Psalm 145 that commemorates the ease with which God commands the natural world.
The bell was the gift, in 1846, of Ebenezer Robinson, a man who was, according to his grandson George, “one of the most remarkable of the early settlers of Reading.” Robinson was born in 1765 in Lexington, Massachusetts. At the still-green age of 16 he joined the Continental forces. He sailed on the Bellasaurias, which, after three months at sea, was captured by a British fleet. “Our sufferings while confined in the old hull of a ship were unaccountably severe,” Robinson told his grandson, “many of our number perished on account of the stench, and the damp, deathly atmosphere.” But Robinson survived and months later was released off the coast of Rhode Island in a prisoner exchange. From there, he walked back to Massachusetts through snow and ice, dependent on the food and shelter he could beg en route. The following spring he returned to the army for another two years. Then in 1788 he and his older brother James resettled in what is now South Reading, where he cleared a farm from the wilderness, an endeavor filled with “remarkable vicissitudes and hardships.” Despite these difficulties, Robinson reached the end of his long life a contented man, never wishing to “change his lot for that of any other, nor his home for that which any other country or clime could afford.”
The pews inside the Old Stone Church today are the same ones from which Ebenezer Robinson and his family listened to Sunday sermons in 1845 and beyond. All the interior has changed very little; the sparsely decorated sanctuary opens up through two stories, save for the space occupied by a little balcony in the rear, and light streams in from the large side windows. Two soapstone wood-fired stoves provide the only heat, their exhaust pipes run nearly the length of the building to spread the warmth. As in the old days, the stoves must be stoked up a day or two in advance of cold weekends to make the building habitable for services.
The congregation was robust in the 1950s and 1960s, remembers Springfield resident Tim Austin, who grew up next door to the church. “The local townspeople were closely knit during that time,” he says, “a lot of people went to church on a regular basis.” There were pageants and other events, and a vacation Bible school in the summer. Christmas and Easter services were particularly packed.
In the last few decades, the numbers in the congregation have ebbed and flowed. Austin remembers his aunt, Eva Gasper, as a force who kept the church going in the 1980s and 1990s. “She was a go-getter,” he recalls, and “she had big ideas sometimes.”
Eva’s connection with the Old Stone Church began soon after she was born in 1903; when she was a young child, her family moved from upstate New York to a farm in South Reading. She left Vermont for years as an adult, but returned when she and her husband retired.
“Life was painful for Eva” in her later years because her spine was riddled with tiny fractures, says Hazel King, who also knew Gasper well, “but she was always ready to go, anywhere.” In part of her seventies, eighties, and nineties, Gasper was the Chairperson of the Old Stone Church Administrative Committee. “She would get on the phone and get guest speakers,” King says of Gasper’s efforts during the times that the church had no regular pastor, “and then gather up [the congregation] and get them in here too.” She led drives to raise funds to re-point the masonry both at the church and at the stone school house down the street.
Nephew Austin recalls one of Gasper’s projects with particular amusement. She decided the church’s interior needed to be repainted, and made all the arrangements, including “wangling” to find a crew of furloughed prison inmates to do the work.
When the job was complete, “Everybody was I think kind of aghast when they first walked in,” says Austin, “It was a surprise that she chose pink.”
King thinks back on the incident fondly. “In photos taken inside the church, there is a glow that is just charming,” she says of the color. And King misses Gasper’s energy, of which she apparently had plenty. She worked as a reporter for the Vermont Standard beginning at age seventy-six; on her one hundredth birthday, publisher Phil Camp delivered the news that then Governor Jim Davis had declared July 2, 2003 “Eva Gasper Day.”
Today the Old Stone Church’s membership has dwindled to a handful or two of committed congregants. There is a small trust fund established decades ago by the Robinson family that covers basic exterior maintenance like mowing the lawn. An interim, part-time pastor, Ruth Bostock of Ludlow, oversees Sunday services. But the bell no longer rings at noon each weekday, and this year, for the first time, the church is closed during the winter.
When Hazel King looks out at the Old Stone Church from her kitchen window, she remembers stuttering over her lines in the Christmas pageant, singing Jesus Loves Me all out of tune, picking berries at church picnics, and wading in the river after Sunday school. It’s not just a building to her, it’s the amalgamation of all the people who treasured it over the years, the Ebenezer Robinsons and the Eva Gaspers, who applied their muscle and vitality to make it a center of community.
To commemorate Reading’s upcoming 250th anniversary, the Reading Writer’s group, of which Hazel King is a member, plans to publish of book of Reading stories. Look for it in July.