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Date: 7/19/2022
AMHERST – Representatives for the South Congregational Church met with the Historical Commission to hear an opinion on the church applying for grant money from the Community Preservation Act Committee (CPAC) for an approximately $150,000 project to take down and reconstruct the four-part bell tower that is starting to lean and deteriorate.
Chair of the church’s Board of Trustees Stephen Mabee said he is one of three board members on the church’s building committee and has been put in charge of the physical care of the church.
“We’ve noticed a serious lean in our steeple and when we go up and explore there are cracked beams, there’s rotted timbers and we have stopped ringing the bell which I know some of our neighbors don’t like just from a safety standpoint to decrease any of the vibration,” Mabee said. “We’re here today just to share with you what our concerns are, what we would like to do and we’re wondering if a CPA grant is an approach that we might use to help renovate the church. It’s more of an exploratory meeting and an introduction.”
Mabee said that the church has emphasized reaching out to the community throughout COVID-19 with half of their fundraising, which mainly comes from takeout dinners going to the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and the Amherst Survival Center. He said that their parking lot is always full and they gladly share it with and allow parking for the Munson Library and all kinds of activities. The church has been a continuous house of worship since 1824 and will be celebrating its 200th birthday in 2024.
“We want to have a year-long celebration with events,” Mabee said. “We’ve got a food committee, we’ve got arts committee formed, we want to have poetry readings, we want to have music in the sanctuary, we want to invite everybody from the community. We also are having a reunion committee where we try to bring back members who have moved away.”
Michael Schafer from Huntley Associates, a land surveyor based in Northampton, explained that the tower is built in four sections. Above the first base section is the bell tower, followed by a cylinder-shaped barrel section and the weathervane. The two wooden sections above the base all extend to the inside of the base rather than being built on top.
“This base is fairly straight, then this bell tower portion leans a little bit, then the barrel leans a little bit more and then the weathervane leans even further,” Schafer said. “It’s kind of like a domino effect if you will, it keeps getting worse and worse. It’s almost like an arching motion.”
Schafer highlighted a crack in the inner workings of the base section that occurred due to improper X-bracing. He said that the X-bracing was supposed to resist the tower from moving when the wind blew on it, but that they connected the X-bracing posts to the center of the vertical beams which is the weakest location in a beam for bending. As the beam has aged and rotted, it eventually cracked and made the whole system on that side unstable, according to Schafer.
Schafer added that the church has done patchwork to temporarily secure the tower and try to keep water out after years of water damage. The patchwork is also somewhat counter-intuitive as it adds more weight to the tower and putting extra strain on the existing problem areas. Schafer said patchwork is no longer a feasible solution and called the base level “quite a mess” from a structural standpoint.
Schafer and Mabee have talked with a contractor to get the initial cost estimate and discuss what needed to happen. They decided to take down every section by crane and completely rebuild them with new, stronger and lighter material.
“The bottom line is our intentions are to reconstruct this in a different fashion, however the appearance will remain exactly the same,” Schafer said. “We’re not looking to change, and God forbid what the congregation and the older members would say if we changed the way that this looked. Our intention is to keep this looking exactly the same but using stronger materials and fixing all the mess that we have up there right now.”
Mabee said the church would try to pay for 10 percent of the project, bringing in $15,000 and asking for the difference. Robin Fordham has been the Historical Commission’s representative for the CPAC for two years and said it would be an “excellent project to bring to the CPAC.”
“I think we’ve begun to establish with the CPA and Town Council the public view of a historic building is actually a public benefit so it fits all of the requirements because it’s not work on the interior which would only serve the congregation, it’s work to preserve the exterior of the building,” Fordham said.
Fordham pointed Mabee to two other funding arms to explore, saying that even if they were approved for CPA money the earliest they would have the funding is July 1, 2023. She recommended applying for money from the Massachusetts Historical Commission Preservation Project Response for emergency stabilization projects and the National Fund for Sacred Places.
Town Planner Ben Breger recommended doing further research on the history of the tower, church and its role in the community over time to include in the grant application.
“CPA is a competitive grant process, there’s limited funds for all sorts of really good projects throughout the town including historic preservation but also open space, affordable housing and conservation,” Breger said. “I think for historic preservation the more you can research obviously the history of the church itself and talk about its role in the founding of south Amherst and the development of that community, specifically in association with the Munson Library and the south Amherst Common, it really is a landmark building for south Amherst and in your application just be sure to frame it like that.”
Breger added, “There’s a convoluted history of the use of CPA funds for houses of worship. There’s some Massachusetts Supreme Court cases that I’m sure will come up quite a few times over the course of the application but because it’s taxpayer public funds going for a church, we need to look at what broader uses the church building serves the community.”