In Jackson, a town of about 1,000 residents, it’s difficult not to notice any small change.
So when the old town hall, now historical society headquarters, was put on wheels and rolled down the street last week, locals crowded to watch.
Lounging on lawn chairs on the sidewalk across the street, enjoying lemonade, popcorn and some steel music, the crowd got a front-row view of the slow but steady progress. To safely move the building only 150 feet that day, it took construction workers about three hours and months of preparation.
But in 2023, the scene outside the building was very different. Devastating floods inundated the building’s basement and destroyed its heating system in the dead of winter.
The building’s location, wedged between the Ellis River and the road, has been particularly vulnerable to flooding and water run-off when it rained.
Looking around at the damage that winter, Jackson Historical Society president Leslie Schomaker assessed what to do next with the group’s former president, Anne Pillion.
“We’re looking around … and we say ‘We need to move the building,’” Pillion recounted. “It cannot survive here.”
But federal money to help the society move the building was not available; the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster recovery programs focused on rebuilding.
Pillion and Schomaker knew that, as climate change fuels more extreme precipitation events, the only way to protect the building long-term was to move it away from the precarious spot.
“To throw a fix at our building was just very shortsighted,” Pillion said. “We weren’t interested in doing the same thing because we knew another storm and flooding was in our future.”
The society could have looked into relocating to a different building altogether. But, according to vice president Stephen Weeder, abandoning ship was never an option.
“It’s our job to try and save historical buildings,” he said. “And several people have argued ‘Well, it’s not a very well-built building, why go through all this effort?’ Well, because it’s historical.”
And the community understood that.
In about a year and a half, they raised over $1 million through grants and private donations to move the 19th century building, which has been used as a town hall, a place to hold Mass and school plays.
For Jackson resident Larry Garland, the building is “a gem for the community.”
Once digging got underway this spring, Garland would stop at the post office across the street to check out the progress.
It started slowly, since getting under the building’s foundation proved to be a puzzle for contractor Gary Sylvester and his team.
“On one side it was the river and we couldn't even walk over there. The other side was the road, which was higher than the bottom of the building, so we couldn't get any cross beams in unless we brought them in at an angle,” he said.
Over the next several months, Sylvester’s team unearthed huge boulders and had to painstakingly move all the utility wires they found. Once the building was raised, it could go onto a platform with wheels and then rolled by a front loader.
After 50 years in the business, Sylvester said he wasn’t daunted by the task at hand.
“You break it down in the steps and, you know, do what you have to do for each day and take it to the next step and take the next step and get it done,” he said.
Around 12 p.m., the wheels moving the building stopped for good, drawing cheers from the crowd.
“The house is over the top of the foundation, it’s all in one piece,” Sylvester assessed. “Nobody got hurt. I’d say it went pretty darn well, wouldn’t you?”
As the crowd cheered, Schomaker, the historical society’s current president, could barely describe her emotions.
“We did it. I can’t believe it,” she said. “It’s very exciting.”
According to Schomaker, other improvements are still to come, including – for the first time ever – a bathroom. No more need for a porta-potty or, as apparently previously adopted by a former society president, a pee jar.
“We still have no indoor plumbing, so we are going to put it,” she said. “We’ll have water for the first time, we have to paint the inside and the outside, so there’s still a lot of renovation to do.”
But that will all come later. For now, the historical society will continue to celebrate getting to make some history themselves and save a fixture in the community from being lost to time.
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