In Town Hill: Creating Community out of Water and Persistence (despite the weather)
Versant issues quick statement on power outage.
TOWN HILL—Sometimes it takes a community to build a community, or at least a skating rink.
Custodians of memory and community, the Town Hill Village Improvement Society is also helping people build community and memory, one timber, one bean supper, one ice skating rink at a time, one fixed roof at a time.
This Sunday, the volunteer organization received help from the MDI YMCA to pull off a winter carnival that drew 50 or more people to the Town Hill Playground and firehouse where a volunteer-built ice-skating rink on the ball field brought laughs, cheers, and togetherness.
“Ice is cold,” one little boy announced as he sat on the rink right near a giant yellow cone.
A girl next to him wobbled on her white skates, but remained standing. “Um . . . yeah?”
It seemed simple, an exchange of five words but as the two laughed together and the boy stood up again, it also became a lot more nuanced. As an abstract for the study entitled “Social Relationships and Health: A Flashpoint for Health Policy” writes, “Social relationships—both quantity and quality—affect mental health, health behavior, physical health, and mortality risk.”
Events like this one on the rink, moments of engagement, laughter, communication, and connection are what the Town Hill Village Improvement Society has been at least partially about ever since its incorporation back in 1893. The cemetery nearby? The Society enlarged it. It improved it. It’s been taking care of the area ever since. The VIS maintains the ball field behind the large, old, the Town Hill Community Hall (the white schoolhouse building once called the West Eden School), the Federated Church, which is just up the street, and helps with the Town Hill Playground. It also has leased part of the hall to the Bar Harbor Fire Department. That lease is currently under discussion.
President Perry Moore previously told the Bar Harbor Story,
“The mission of the VIS is to be caretakers of the community spaces in Town Hill. While this was originally mostly about the cemetery, in 1949 we took over the old schoolhouse and this became a meeting place for organizations based in Town Hill like the volunteer fire department. In 2007 the last congregation to use the church handed it over to the VIS because they didn't have the time nor energy to take care of it. That building—like the cemetery and schoolhouse—is full of family memories of a lot of Town Hill residents and part of the collective community history.”
It isn’t always easy. Volunteers gathered in December to build the rink. The lack of snow, rain, and cold kept the surface from becoming ice. Last week, the Bar Harbor Fire Department helped out. This weekend, Moore and Matt Gerald worked together to make sure there was a skateable surface for Sunday’s event.
“Getting the ice in place was something of a hurdle,” Moore said. “The weather simply hasn’t cooperated this winter. The ground had not frozen under part of the rink and it was almost forty degrees on Thursday and Friday. On Friday, Matt Gerald and I cleared off the slush and started adding water using a hose. It worked pretty well except that the water was somewhere over 40 degrees and so it was melting part of what we had in place.
With most of the rink flooded, they called it a day on Friday as the sun set. But on Saturday morning when they arrived at the rink, the water had mostly drained down because the liner was leaking.
“But, since it was well below freezing, we managed to start putting down thin layers of water that froze and got us good coverage by about lunch time. Then the sun came out and melted most of what we had put down that morning. We waited until the sun went below the treetops and started putting down more water. I called it a day around seven that night and Matt stayed until almost ten. He set up an oscillating sprinkler from his farm and let it run overnight.”
Things still hitched.
“When I got there before dawn on Sunday morning, the sprinkler had frozen in one position and melted a puddle in one part of the rink, but it was pretty full of water and was freezing well. We spent all morning putting down more thin layers of ice and smoothing the surface,” Moore said. “By ten, most of it was usable, but part of the center was soft so we set up cones and just told people not to skate between the cones. It ended up working really well, given the weather.”
It was persistence and ingenuity that made it happen, which has been a hallmark of both the Town Hill VIS and the MDI YMCA’s longevity.
“The folks from the YMCA did an awesome job arranging activities and keeping kids engaged,” Moore said. “They brought a cool stand-up sled and skates for people to use along with hockey sticks and pucks. There was crafts and games upstairs. Without Ann Tikkanen, Zach Lanning, and Jen Britz it could have been a rather droll event on the sketchy ice. We were really lucky to have them help out.”
Along with the Y, other VIS members helped out. Randy Sprague made chili, Gail Damon created a fish chowder, and there was a vegetarian corn chowder. There were biscuits, cornbread, and brownies, with few leftovers, Moore said. Kathy Schulz helped get things set up and cleaned up and served food. Art happened upstairs in the old meeting hall. There was even a cornhole game set up.
“At one point, I just had to laugh, though. It seemed like a lot of the kids were having more fun breaking up the ice in the middle than they were skating,” Moore said.
In a 2021 article, Dora Mekouar writes for VOA,
“‘We really have moved much more towards a national community and I think even things like social media have abstracted us so much from our local communities, that we've been moving steadily towards a much more kind of nationalized community,’ says Brad Birzer, a professor of history at Hillsdale College.
“We used to think of the community good as a local thing, and now we tend to think of it as the whole country. So, we've definitely nationalized, to a certain extent, in our thinking, and the way that we govern ourselves.”
Every small event, interaction, couple of kids on ice with their parents talking together on the hardened grass makes local community stronger. That’s part of what the society has been doing for decades and part of what the Y’s events do as well.
On the western side of Bar Harbor, Town Hill was first settled by European descendants in 1790. That was Gideon Mayo. In 1808, Ephraim Higgins came along. They had public meetings. Sometimes those would be in school houses. Sometimes they’d be in private homes. They held fairs. They sold things. They fixed the land that was called Town Hill. They built a hall in the upper portions of the school house. In 1907 the society, led by Ida Rich, built a union church. Why? They thought it was what the area needed.
When Joy Kelly began the effort to make the Town Hill Playground back in the early 2000s. The society helped. Why? They thought it was what the area needed.
“The importance of the VIS is that it gives Town Hill residents a voice in what happens in Town Hill as an organized, collective voice,” Moore said.
This happened recently when a local mother organized an effort to collect pledges to put a fence up around the Town Hill playground, which was also funded by donations and not the town.
From hosting a town council debate, to housing one of the town’s antique fire engines, to holding performance and festivals, the society has been painstakingly and often quietly taking care of the community. Sometimes that means talking about water levels, bats, zoning. Sometimes that means building a playground. Sometimes that means working together to create a place to skate that’s safe.
“The weather looks pretty sketchy this week, but we’re going to try and get the base solidified so we can use it as much as possible through the rest of the winter,” Moore said. “Matt really did the heavy lifting, and if it hadn’t been for him, there wouldn’t have been ice. Maybe if the weather cooperates, we can have the rink there for pick-up hockey games, birthday parties, and just skating.”
All photos (unless otherwise specified) by Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar
VERSANT OUTAGE FEBRUARY 5
A power outage in the early morning hours of February 5 left entire towns in Hancock and Washington Counties without power for approximately twenty-two minutes. The company is still investigating the cause of the outage.
According to Versant’s Marissa Minor, “At 01:00 a.m., there was a fault on a transmission line affecting 20,845 customers. The outage was restored at 1:22 a.m.”
Versant workers are checking the transmission line to try and determine the cause of the short outage. It could be something like a tree limb falling on the line and then falling off again, Minor said.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
To contact us by email:
townhillvis7@gmail.comStreet Address:
1328 State Highway 102
Bar Harbor, ME 04609
To make a donation please contact them here.
Its Facebook page is here.
The MDI YMCA’s website is here.
