Old White Meeting House

The Old White Meeting House
By Paige Brownell (4th Grade Student--Folsom School)

Last October the 7-8 and 3-4 students from Folsom school walked to the Old White Meeting House on Rt. 2 in South Hero. The Old White Meeting House was one of the first public buildings in town and was used as the first church, and as a place for people in town to meet for different reasons. It is a sturdy building built by the best which at the time were barn carpenters.

    We learned the building was much grander when it was built in 1816 than it is now. That’s because the building originally had the cupola in front on top and not on the ground in the back. Many other towns in VT did not have a cupola on their White Meeting Houses and ours did.
      
It started out as a Methodist Church. Later it was a high school called Maple Lawn Academy. The teacher was named Fannie Stevens, and she taught grades 9-12 from 1900-1911.  It also was a 5-8 school until Folsom was built in 1949. Some people who live in South Hero today actually went to school there. For a little while after that it also had grades 9 and 10.

 We saw people's names under the staircase. We think kids who went to school there in the past wrote them. It might have been that the kids got sent to the corner for being bad. We also saw a container of dried up glue in the closet. Maybe it was left over school supplies. We also saw evidence upstairs in Granny's Attic that there used to be desks nailed to the floor and we saw a hole in the wall where the flag used to hang. Oh, I forgot to mention, it’s the 60th anniversary of Granny’s Attic this year. That means they have been selling things for 60 years and making donations to various organizations in town all that time.

.       Bret Corbin met us when we got there. He told us a story about years ago when it was a church and a man used to sing beautifully. The man’s heart was broken when he was told that they were going to have services in a new church on South Street. He loved this church so much that he did not want it to be changed.

This church has a lot of memories that people still cherish today.

If you want to know more about the Old White Meeting House come to the next South Hero Historical Society meeting on Friday, March 1st at Folsom School at 7pm. I also want to thank Sharon Hayes, our librarian, who made a DVD of John Roy’s talk at the last Historical meeting. He was telling about South Hero when he was a kid; so make sure you look for it when you go to the South Hero Library . You can also see it on the South hero Historical Society website.
 http://southherohistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/