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The ol’ town hall
By Conrad Beaubien
In searching through a drawer of kitchen linens in recent weeks I came across a long forgotten table cloth. I set it out to be visible daily as I pondered the personal significance of the thing. This is not a garden variety kind of table cloth; I collected it a number of years ago and why it appealed to me then, carries even more meaning now.
The cloth is of cream coloured light cotton, roughly three feet by four in dimension. It has a stitched border of crimson red that finishes the edges and it’s within those borders where its story lies. Imagine a large sheet of paper with a number of individual names and signatures on it. The table cloth is a version of that where a host of men and women are identified by their signatures: Aunt Mabel, Marg Brush, Daniel Cooke, Uncle Bill McDevit December 31 for example. Added to that are other dates such as ’44 or 1936 or Nov. 24, 1938. All of the inscriptions, over fifty of them, are hand embroidered in a rainbow of colours. In some places, traces of pencilled signatures can be spotted as they waited to be enlivened with fine cotton floss in deep sea blue, sunrise orange, or sharp turquoise. I have seen memory quilts that were produced in previous times where an expression or a person’s name was embroidered into one of the patches and so I’m guessing that the table cloths inception was about remembering.
I surmise that a group of people convened on a regular basis, likely a public space. The dimensions of the cloth suggest a cover for a card table, perhaps for playing euchre or whatever. What it spells out in a broad context is the meaning of community; where a group of women and men once socialized regularly and left behind a symbol of that warmth. What appeals to me is that this is a piece of folk art in the truest sense, a view of the world by common folk with an untrained hand, individuals who had something important and unique to them that they wanted to express.
The word community derives from the Old French comunete or the Latin communis which simply means people with common interest. The meeting or gathering places for folks with pursuits alike were typically the market square, a public square or a community hall. To me the table cloth is all about that —companionship, gatherings, socializing.
What I found interesting in searching for alternative words for gathering places was that other ancient words that carry the same meaning are plaza, mall and arcade. It occurs to me how the latter words have been appropriated from the mid nineteen fifties onward to mean stores, retail, shopping and getting there by car. No doubt that the malls of today can be gathering places for many as they are climate controlled for all seasons and the indoor surface makes walking and accessibility more facile.
What my table cloth also reminds me of, especially in recent times, is how gatherings have been interrupted but importantly how over time the role of the ol’ town hall has landed in the shadows. Most recently, County assigned evaluators toured the region to make assessments of the inventory of publicly owned buildings. There are a variety of structures and land in that inventory that has been carried forward over decades, way before the 1990s time of amalgamation. The results of the survey have recently been made public. The feeling is that the process was more or less a clipboard checklist to help determine in a superficial way what should go and what should stay.
I mention the above for reasons of people with common interests. According to the evaluators, among the list of important buildings in the region to be rid of are Hillier Hall. It is understood that costs of maintaining properties is a significant drain on public funds and that the use of public buildings has to be justified in practical ways and that attractions for coming together of townspeople have changed over generations.
What is missing from cursory appraisal in this case is soul; how a public building rates in terms of cultural, historical and social importance. Buildings are not simply bricks or stone and mortar, they can symbolize a sense of place, the spirit of a locale; the role they may have played in forming communities since Europeans first landed here. In fairness, the ‘use it or lose it’ mantra also deserves consideration. Since the 1950s there has been a slow paradigm shift of community centering. The meaning of mall or arcade in today’s parlance has contributed to decentralizing neighbourhoods; amalgamation of smaller places into one has also shifted the core of places. We are in an era of challenge and rapid evolution but looking back through history this appears as an ongoing theme of humanity which forces change upon us, of second thought about core merit.
Maybe the table cloth surfaced to remind me of the importance of community and that while the use of a building may have altered, its meaning has likely not. It’s a time of redefining how buildings like all of our former town halls as markers of history fit into the contemporary world. Nostalgia alone can’t support the cost to maintain and possibly the new era which is upon us is a time to reflect on human values, recognizing one another and supporting the businesses and institutions that are integral to making community work. Who knows, we may decide to stitch our names onto a huge table cloth the size of the mainsail of a three masted schooner to create opportunity to safely unite in intention while reinventing, reclaiming identity, and engaging in the true reasons for the o’ town hall.
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