Recollections of the Town Hall

View of the stage in the Opera Hall (second floor of the Town Hall building). The Opera Hall had a sloped floor, curved seats, a sunken orchestra, and a “modern” drop curtain. The chairs, scenery, carpets, and decorations were donated by Frank S. Mackenzie. Mackenzie was a local philanthropist who also established the Lucy Mackenzie Humane Society in memory of his wife, Lucy Collamer Mackenzie.

By Jennie Shurtleff

For over 120 years, the Town Hall in Woodstock has graced the western side of the Green. When the building first opened in 1900, it was not only home to the town's offices, but it also had an opera house on the second floor.  Later, the building became the site where area residents gathered for a variety of events including movies, basketball games, and tonsillectomy clinics.

 An undated transcript in the Woodstock History Center’s archives records the remembrances of some longtime residents as they reminisced about the early days of this building, as well as the building’s later reconstruction after being partially destroyed by a fire in February of 1927. Below are some excerpts from that transcript. (Please note, in some cases the text has been edited slightly or ellipses added to make the text easier to read.)

Fred Doubleday:

“I remember the Town Hall back when the theater was upstairs and you went in the front door and about half way across there, the stairs went up from either side and came down together and then went up again. I used to go there to the movies because my dad ran the movies, and I somehow seemed to get in free which was really pretty good.

They used to have the basketball games downstairs, and I remember as a kid we would go to those games to see the town team play or the high school, and during the half time… you’d go out on the floor and people would throw pennies or dimes just to see you scramble for them. And some of these wise guys would light up a pipe and put a dime or a nickel or a quarter in there and then they’d toss it out and see you scramble, but we learned to wear gloves…

There’ve been a lot of changes… when they rebuilt the place [after the fire in 1927, they] put the theater downstairs and basketball court upstairs so you couldn’t have the two at the same time unless you had a marching movie and they were marching all the way though… I guess there weren’t too many of those.”  

Fred Doubleday

Paul Bourdon:

“My earliest recollections [of the Town Hall] are when I used to go to the movies. My mother played the piano for the old silent movies… The fare was 10 cents for the Saturday afternoon matinee... The projection room as I remember it… was operated in a gallery or in the balcony. It was a box-shaped space probably about 10 feet square, and as I remember it had an asbestos board covering on it because it was a fire hazard… The seats, and I think they were the same seats that were subsequently put downstairs, were made of some sort of plywood… and under the seats was a horseshoe-shaped wire business that hung down…. And a man could take his hat and push his hat under the seat, and it held the hats. The women I guess kept their hats on their heads. In addition to keeping the hat under the seat, it was a nice repository for chewing gum if people got sick of chewing…”

In addition to recreation events, the Town Hall was used as the site for tonsillectomy clinics. The organizers of these clinics would line up the cots, close to one another, in a big room so that as many children as possible could have their tonsils removed efficiently.  Dr. Gifford [for whom Gifford Memorial Hospital in Randolph is named] served as the attending doctor. Paul Bourdon went on to note that: “It was sort of a rough experience. They pulled out tonsils by the bushel basket full. Maybe not quite that bad but there were lots of them. They would grab us and put us down, and I remember a nurse named Mrs. Grace Manley sat on me to hold me down and as they [the children] came out from under the ether, they would holler and yell. It was quite an event.”

Another remembrance that was shared by several of the participants at the session was the fire that occurred in February of 1927. This fire damaged much of the building.

Left: View of the Town Hall/Opera House before the fire which occurred in February of 1927.

Right: View of the Town Hall with the present pedimented entry way which was added as part of the post-fire renovations.

Reverend Edward Williams, known to many as “Father Ned,” shared the following recollection of the fire.

“I was thinking about the fire because my dad at the time it occurred was town treasurer and at the time that office was just inside the door to the left. He had accounting machines more mystifying to me than even a computer is today. He could lift a thing and shift it over and multiply things by a hundred or tens of thousands. It was fairly expensive equipment. And it was part of his engineering equipment for surveying, so he had a lot of his surveying equipment in the office as well as the town treasury records… Some lady across the Green from the Town Hall was having a hard time sleeping and she got up to get a glass of water or something, and she thought she saw fire, and she went to the window and sure enough it was the fire… So they rang the operator, and they called my father from the telephone office right after they called the fire department because they knew that he was the town treasurer and there might be some important papers. So he went up there in the middle of the night. At that time, we were living in an apartment… My mother jumped up out of her bed and followed him to the door and said, ‘Where are you going in the middle of the night?’ and he said, ‘The Town Hall’s on fire!’ And off he went. Of course, when he got down there, there were flames everywhere… So he persuaded someone that he could climb a ladder and get up on the outside of the window of his office, the door was closed and locked and so there wouldn’t be any air circulation in that room connected with any other part of the building. He could get the town records out and he did.”

The renovation following the fire was not the only renovation to the Town Hall. In 1981, David McWilliams became the director of Pentangle. The theater portion of the Town Hall was in rough shape when he took over.

McWilliams notes:

“I really wanted to have a theater where we could have proper equipment and such and I went exploring around on the stage in the Town Hall and was told immediately, ‘No, you can’t use the stage at all because the fire marshal condemned it about 10 years ago, and all that is to happen down there is movies to be shown. Nothing is to happen on stage.’ And when we walked out on the stage, it looked like the fire marshal must have closed it down in the middle of a show because the scenery was still hanging up and there were still platforms around on the stage, and it had been turned into a storage area for the town records… And over on the left side of the stage was the old lighting system which was a bit like Dr. Frankenstein’s leftovers – big copper bars and buss bars that carried electricity and then huge handles that operated resistance dimmers. It all still worked, but it was as dangerous as you could get and nothing you wanted to have kids around.”

The projection booth at that time was only accessible by a ladder. The films that were to be shown would come in large canisters that weighed 50, 60, or 70 pounds each. Using a pulley system, they would be hauled up though a little shaft to the projection booth. While the system for getting films to the projection booth was outdated, the chairs in the theater were also in need of replacement. David notes that before the second renovation of the Town Hall theater, the famed singer Odetta came to Woodstock to do a concert. As she was waiting for the performance to begin, she kept asking if there were birds in the theater. When asked why she posed that question, she responded that she kept hearing a chirping sound. It turns out that the chirping was not due to birds but to the squeaking of the seats as people moved around trying to get comfortable.  As part of the renovation, the seats were ultimately taken out, reupholstered and painted.

One of the fund raisers for the Town Hall’s renovation in the 1980s was a painting featuring some of Pentangle’s early supporters who helped to spearhead both the organization and its fundraising efforts. Thanks to Charlet Davenport, the Woodstock History Center now has a copy of this painting in its collection.

Painting by local artist Charlotte Boggs depicting some of Pentangle’s many patrons who supported Pentangle and the Town Hall renovation project in the 1980s.

Top row, L to R: Kevin Forrest, Mrs. Philip Camp, Phillip Camp, Frank Teagle, Ann Adams, Peter Jennison, Missy Cunningham

Second row, L to R: Georgina Williamson, Sally Shane, Buck Shane, David Winton, Susan Winton, Josephine McWilliams, John McWilliams

Third Row, L to R: Frank Lieberman, Ellison Lieberman, Nancy Wickham Boyd, Polly Billings, Bill Billings, Lou Kannenstine, Margaret (Peggy) Kannenstine

Fourth Row, L to R: David McWilliams, Charlet Davenport, Barbara Kaufman, William B. (Wimby) Hoyt, Timmie Bourne, Gertrude Mertens, Sabra Field

© Woodstock History Center