The Christian Church, 1838–1917

The Christian Church of Franklin was organized on January 21, 1838, with twenty-one members. Its building committee — Joshua Fifield, James Clark, and Caleb Merrill, described in church records as “very highly respected business men” — struck an agreement with the town selectmen to let the basement of the new building serve as the town hall. That arrangement held until the Opera House (Memorial Hall) was built.

The first building was dedicated on November 7, 1838, free of debt. Rev. Elijah Shaw preached the dedicatory sermon on a text from Isaiah 56:6–7: “For mine house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.”

The following year, 1839, the selectmen placed a clock in the church — the same year the congregation purchased its first bell. In December 1872 the church bought a pipe organ from Ryder and Company for $1,650, paid in full. By the early twentieth century the congregation had grown to 175 members, and the church was the second oldest in the city.

The fire

At 3:10 in the morning on March 21, 1917, the seventy-nine-year-old church burned to the ground. Nothing was left standing but the big chimney and a small portion of the north wall, both later taken down. Every piece of church property was destroyed except a piano and an old communion table.

The belfry held against the flames for an unusually long time before it toppled, cracking the bell as it fell. The old clock was faithful to the last: it struck the morning hour of four o’clock and then fell with the tower.

Rebuilding

The contract for the second building — the one standing today — was awarded to Walter Dunlap of Laconia. It was completed at a cost of $45,000 and was considered one of the finest church buildings in the state, admired for its brick and masonry exterior and its stained glass. The cornerstone was laid June 12, 1917, and the new building was dedicated on November 3, 1918.

As part of the rebuilding, the tower was extended an additional twenty feet — at an added cost of $200 — so that the new clock would sit atop the bell tower and be visible throughout the city.

The Cornerstone

The cornerstone bears a single inscription: “The Christian Church, June 12, 1917.” Beneath it, the congregation buried a box whose contents were recorded by Albert G. Garneau, Official Franklin Historian. Among them:

• The first brick laid when the first town hall and former church was built in 1838
• A Bible printed in 1836 — two years before the old church was raised
• The Christian Annual for 1917, along with the Herald of Liberty, the Sunday School Herald, and the Christian Missionary
• Two copies of the Journal-Transcript, one carrying the story of the fire and a historical sketch of the church, and a copy of Tuesday’s Manchester Union
• The local church manual listing the names of all 710 people who had ever belonged to the church, including fifty who had joined since January 1, and the seven pastors who had gone out from the congregation
• The historical sermon delivered by Rev. T. G. Moses on the south side of the church
• Monthly calendars, the By Laws of the Ladies Social Union, church envelopes, membership cards, and pledge cards for the rebuilding fund
• Photographs of Rev. O. J. Wait, Rev. T. G. Moses, and Rev. L. W. Phillips — three pastors whose pastorates spanned forty-eight years of the church’s history
• Photographs of every Protestant church in Franklin, and of the city itself: a bird’s eye view, the Webster Birthplace, the High School Building, Nesmith School, and Franklin Hospital
• Reports of the N.H. Orphan’s Home, the Franklin Hospital Association, and the Golden Rule Farm Homes

An American silk flag was laid on top of the box before the stone went down.

The Bell

The church bought its first bell in 1839. It was cross-braced heavily into the tower to minimize the forces the huge bell exerted on the building when it was rung.

The bell has been recast twice, and its own surface records why. Cast into the bronze:

A photograph believed to date from the 1890s shows the bell being hoisted back into the belfry after its first recasting.

The third casting — the bell that hangs in the building today — was removed from the tower on June 19, 2008, during the tower restoration, and is now displayed on the first floor.

The Town Clock

After the 1917 fire destroyed the old clock, the city stepped in. In May 1918, Councilman William Stewart moved that the City appropriate $500 to assist in the purchase of a new four-faced clock, with the understanding that the Christian Church Society would care for it without expense to the City. The church kept that bargain for twenty-eight years, paying for lighting and maintenance itself. The city’s only contribution in that period was a single new cable purchased in 1941.

A memorandum from the church, “History of Facts Concerning Town Clock,” lays out the arithmetic of keeping it lit. The clock was wired for eight bulbs; the church burned four at sixty watts each, going through sixteen bulbs a year at $1.76. Those lights ran roughly 4,200 hours apiece — 16,800 hours a year in total, or 1,008 kilowatt-hours, which at $4.22 a month came to $50.64 annually. And, as the memo notes, the clock also had to be wound, oiled, adjusted, and occasionally repaired.

The lights went dark once. In 1942, at the request of the Governor, the clock’s illumination was extinguished as part of the wartime blackout effort.

On February 4, 1947, City Clerk Mildred S. Gilman wrote to Bessie C. Rowell, Clerk of the Christian Church Society — whose name is also cast into the bell — with the Council’s answer:

The clock has been known as the Town Clock ever since.

Meridian Lodge No. 60, F. & A. M.

Meridian Lodge No. 60 of the Free and Accepted Masons was chartered in Franklin on June 10, 1856. In 1981 the Lodge purchased the former Christian Church for use as its meeting hall.

As the brethren prepared for the move, Edward L. King wrote to the membership proposing a memorials program, after some raised concerns that the fittings they wanted for the new home on South Main Street could not be afforded out of the renovation budget alone. Donors could sponsor rooms — the vestibule at $1,000, the kitchen at $2,500, the Ladies Parlor at $5,000, the Lodge Room at $10,000 — and every donor, whatever the amount, was to be named on a plaque in the entrance foyer. The program was, in King’s words, entirely voluntary: no one would be approached personally, and members had to initiate contact themselves.

By April 1981 the Building Committee could report real progress. Downstairs, new plumbing, heating, and wiring were roughed in, a new floor had been poured in the kitchen area, partitions were set, and the new stairs were in. Upstairs, the new Lodge room was taking shape as the Don Snyder Co. proceeded on schedule. Members were invited to stop in anytime for a “grand tour.”

Much of the rest was done by hand. The committee scheduled Saturday work parties through May — foundation drain and brush clearing on the 2nd, brick demolition and stage painting on the 9th, landscaping and wallpapering on the 16th, moving and floor sanding on the 23rd. Start time 9 a.m., coffee provided.

Renovation also produced surplus. The Lodge offered members radiators, doors, wainscoting, lavatories, fuel oil tanks, and a 36-foot barn door suspension rail. Hardest to move were the pews: approximately 250 feet of slightly curved solid oak, eighteen pieces ranging from three and a half to twenty-two feet, offered as a set for $2,500 with no takers. The committee eventually agreed to cut them to any length a member wanted and deliver them for $150 apiece.

The Lodge held an open house in November 1981. Reporting on it, The Trumpeter noted that Meridian Lodge had converted the former Christian Church into a meeting place for the Masons, Ionic Chapter No. 20, OES, DeMolay and Rainbow, and that visitors remarked repeatedly on how well the Masons had redesigned the church for Masonic purposes without destroying the religious architecture. The medieval treatment of the former sanctuary drew particular praise.

Later accounts singled out the large basement-level room and stage as among the finest original features of the building — including a hand-painted stage curtain depicting the Old Man of the Mountain, used as a backdrop.

The Organ and Its Conversion

The 1872 Ryder and Company pipe organ did not survive the fire; apart from a piano and an old communion table, nothing of the church’s property came through it.

The instrument that later stood in the Lodge Room was built by the Estey Organ Company of Brattleboro, Vermont, circa 1916–17 — contemporary with the present building. As organs go it was a small one: eight speaking stops across two manuals plus a single pedal stop, the pipes standing on pneumatic action chests and voiced almost entirely at unison pitch, with only one stop above and one below the normal pitch of a piano.

That was common practice among builders of the period, suited to the repertoire of the day — very little Bach or contrapuntal writing was played on organs then, and when such pieces were performed, orchestral transcriptions were used instead. Electrical-action organs, the so-called Unit Orchestras, were slow to arrive outside large cities, where electrical supply was unreliable or simply nonexistent. Robert Hope-Jones and the Wurlitzer Company of New York eventually made the type famous with the “Mighty Wurlitzer,” which accompanied silent pictures in thousands of theaters worldwide, and other major builders followed with versions of their own.

The conversion proposal

Philip W. Wellington of Pipe Organ Service in Franklin prepared a detailed packet for the Lodge proposing that what remained of the Estey be converted to a modern conception of the Unit Orchestra.

The case for rebuilding rather than repairing was blunt: the chests on which the pipes stood, the wind handling devices, and some of the wooden pipes had been so severely damaged by water as to be unrepairable. Wellington’s plan called for new chests and wind handling equipment and the electrification of the entire instrument. Electrifying it would also allow the console — already rebuilt by that point — to be remoted into the Lodge Room itself, where the Lodge Musician could observe the ritual unobtrusively and provide the appropriate accompaniment.

Electric action carried a second advantage: most of the original pipework could be kept and put to far greater use. Adding twelve pipes to the top octave of each rank would let a single eight-foot Flute stop, for example, be drawn at 16′, 8′, 4′, 2⅔′, and 2′ — a small organ in a limited space made to sound like a much larger one, with many of the tone colors of the bigger instrument.

The stop list that had stood from 1917 to 1991 comprised nine speaking stops and eleven inter- and intra-manual coupler switches. The proposed list expanded that to twenty-six speaking stops, retaining the original eleven couplers, with preparation envisioned for a set of chimes and one blank tablet per manual. Some ranks were to be deleted where they did not fit the new tonal scheme — the Great Open Diapason removed, for instance, and the Swell Violin Diapason racked in its place.

There was an acoustic problem too. The organ chamber was completely walled off from the Lodge Room, where the sound was meant to be enjoyed, and Wellington was careful to note he was not advocating rebuilding the Lodge Room to fix it. Giving the organ octave and super-octave pitches would lighten its basic tone and help it carry out of the nearly closed organ room.

The numbers

The itemized recap came to $13,145.96, plus shipping from Erie, Pennsylvania. Items still unpriced at the time of writing — a custom-built stop board for the console, and the raw lumber for chests, wind trunks, swell front, and swell box — could push the bottom line toward $20,000. Wellington considered it a bargain even so: new organ pricing then ran $10,000 to $15,000 per rank, which put a ten-rank instrument at $150,000 and an eighty-rank instrument at $800,000. The Lodge, he wrote, was privileged to have so many parts and pipes that could be refurbished and used to good advantage. The prices in the packet already reflected an average 7% increase in materials over his original 1991 figures, and every month of delay added more.

One item fell outside the estimate entirely. Wellington had searched every circuit breaker panel in the Lodge building and never found a breaker for the organ motor — which left him to assume the blower was running off one of the building’s old knob-and-tube lighting circuits, a situation he called unacceptable on grounds of both safety and efficiency.

The work went forward. Wellington carried out a conversion and restoration of the instrument over the course of the 1990s. The walled-off chamber was dealt with more directly than his packet had proposed: rather than relying on voicing alone to coax the sound out, the wall was opened up and replaced with a mesh fabric screen, so that the organ can now be both seen and heard from the room. What survives with the building is Wellington’s proposal rather than a record of the finished job, so how closely the completed organ followed the packet in every other particular is not something the papers tell us.

Saving the Tower, 2008

The tower had leaked for years. An early Lodge committee — Alfred Elliott as chairman, with Robert Hoyt and John R. Benham — was appointed to investigate, and its report drew on an engineering summation finding the brick veneer on the upper portion of the tower unstable, though the structure itself appeared strong.

That committee, joined by Hollis Morrill, brought in Stan Graton, a contractor and covered bridge expert, who inspected the tower from the basement up to the clock room as a courtesy, at no cost. His verdict on the framing was emphatic: very sound and strong, and probably not moved a fraction of an inch since it was built. The horizontal bricklines at the base of both the building and the tower were identical, indicating stability; the foundation was uncracked; the sheathing under the brick was stained but not rotted; the large timbers, sawn on an up-and-down mill, ran full length with no splices. Some of the horizontal framing was still arched upward exactly as the builders had set it. The weight of the clock and bell on framing like that, he said, was insignificant.

The brick was another matter. It bulged outward at several points above the roofline, weighed an estimated 11,000-plus pounds on the tower alone, and was letting rain in at the loose courses and the flashing. The committee’s recommendation was to repair and restore the tower so the clock could be restarted for the convenience of the town — perhaps with the bell chiming at noon, at “High Twelve.”

Estimates were gathered. Balzer Clockworks valued the clock at $12,000–$15,000 and the faces at $2,500; Brosamer’s Bells confirmed a $6,000 figure for the bell. At one point an offer was floated to trade demolition of the tower for the clock, bell, and other fittings.

Gale Associates and the final plan

Contractors’ figures pointed toward demolishing the tower as the most cost-effective answer, and the Masons — reluctant to deplete a budget they wanted spent on being active and charitable in the community — came close to accepting that. Instead, in 2008, under the leadership of Brother John R. Benham, the Lodge hired Gale Associates, Inc. of Bedford, N.H., a consulting engineering firm specializing in the investigation, evaluation, and repair of building envelopes, to find an alternative. Gale had first visited the site on August 15, 2007. Their evaluation confirmed ongoing leakage, extensive staining, and deterioration of both the exterior masonry and the tower’s wood balloon frame.

On May 13, 2008, the committee — John R. Benham as chairman, with Robert Hoyt, Ernest Smith, and Hollis Morrill — met with Gale to confer on options. The Lodge also retained architect Jerry Tepe of JRT — AIA Architect in Hopkinton to produce alternate tower designs and final drawings.

The accepted solution saved the tower from the floor of the belfry down:

• Demolish the upper three stories, removing three stories of brick and cast stone veneer and wood framing
• Frame the new tower roof into the existing lower roof
• Relocate one face of the clock, and the clock motor, to the first story of the tower, facing South Main Street
• Relocate the bell to the surrounding foundation on grade, to be saved for display
• Perform isolated masonry repairs, including repointing and cracked brick replacement, in the areas designated to remain

A motion approved May 8, 2008 authorized the Tower Committee to contract with D.L. King Associates, Inc. of Nashua to carry out the work to Gale’s plans and specifications, to spend up to an additional ten percent against unforeseen circumstances, and to obtain a $200,000 loan from Franklin Savings Bank.

The work

Restoration began May 19, 2008. By early June the brick and framework of the clock tower had come down, and the danger the committee had feared was confirmed in the form of rotted timbers. On June 19 the bell was lowered to the ground and the remainder of the bell tower removed. The new tower went up over the following months, the old chimney was removed and replaced, and work wound up in October.

The 60-foot tower that had faced South Main Street since 1918 is now a single story. It carries one clock face instead of four, still driven by the same motor that has run it for decades. The 1839 bell, in its third casting, sits on the first floor of the building.

The Lodge raised money toward the loan through a fundraising program of its own: memorial bricks, a table lodge, and the sale of excess material from the project, including stained-glass windows removed during the work.

Asked about it afterward, John Benham — who chaired the restoration — put it plainly: it had been worth the effort, and the point was to preserve a beautiful building so that future generations could know more about the city’s heritage.

Timeline

Compiled from Meridian Lodge No. 60 building and tower committee records, City of Franklin correspondence, the inscription on the church bell, the organ conversion packet prepared by Philip W. Wellington, and contemporary newspaper accounts in The Trumpeter and The Weirs Times.