historical buildings – New England's Narrow Road

My grandfather belonged to The Grange when I was growing up in Massachusetts. Other than that, I knew very little about why there are buildings called by this name. So I thought I’d find out.

Wikipedia says that the full name of a “Grange” is the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry. The grange hall was the meeting place for farmers and the order of the grange was an advocacy group for farmers and their needs.
Everyone was welcome to join, and even women could hold positions of importance.
The headquarters is still in Washington, D.C. even though membership is now less than it was back in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman were members of the National Grange along with Norman Rockwell. Read more about the history of the grange here.

The Antrim Grange is a place where various meetings are held to honor community members for service and once or twice a year they have art shows there. Since the number of farmers has declined, most grange halls are used for meetings such as this now.

I don’t know much about Antrim’s stone church except that it is a beautiful structure.

Recently the Historical Society accepted the church as a gift from the Rymes family and the Stone Church Foundation and will look into having some restoration done.

The town is very active in preserving history and historical buildings and every month they have some sort of presentation at a local downtown church. I attended a few of them. One was about old bridges and I remember being surrounded by “old timers” who knew the exact locations of all the places talked about whereas I (being a new member of the community) was a bit lost.

It makes me wish I’d been part of a small town for all my life.