Spruce-up in store for South Canaan Meeting House

FALLS VILLAGE — Work will begin in the spring on the South Canaan Meeting House, to repair and restore the steeple, stabilize the building and add a small elevator in the rear of the building for handicapped access.

The work will be paid for in part with a $200,000 state Small Town Economic Assistance Program grant (STEAP).

The Falls Village-Canaan Historical Society will need to raise an additional $10,000 to $15,000 to make badly needed repairs inside the building.

Judy Jacobs of the Historical Society said Monday, Dec. 1, that the interior, particularly the ceiling, is in dire need of painting.

There is a lot of peeling paint on the ceiling, and once the workers get through the flaking layers, they may well find a condensation problem.

The STEAP project will concentrate on the steeple. Some of the slats will likely have to be replaced, as will rotting timbers.

“We’ve been patching it for years,” Jacobs said.

The workers may end up taking the steeple off at some point, she added.

The original structure is in pretty good shape, however, according to Jacobs.

Inside, workers will have to pull up the existing carpeting in order to get at the floor structure. Jacobs said the plan is to remove the carpeting in such a way that it can be put back down, but the Historical Society may opt to go with a plain wooden floor instead.

There are no specific fundraising events planned yet. Jacobs said a house tour in the spring is a possibility.

And the Boy Scouts recently volunteered to paint a shed on the property in the spring.

The South Canaan Meeting House has a long and somewhat tangled history, beginning with the incorporation of the Town of Canaan in 1739.

In October of that year, the townspeople were “granted liberty to organize a church,” according to J. Frederick Kelly’s “Early Connecticut Meetinghouses.” (An excerpt is available in booklet form from the Falls Village-Canaan Historical Society.)

At a town meeting April 29, 1740, and again on March 13, 1741, the citizens voted to build a meeting house, and the building was in use by the summer of 1744.

But this was not at the same location as the current structure. According to Kelly, this meeting house stood on the western side of “Six-rod Highway.”

The Canaan Society, or congregation, split in 1767, and the decision was made to move the meeting house “some distance to the south.”

Then the citizens talked it over, for three decades.

In 1801, “after more than 30 years of disagreement, principally over the choice of site, the much-discussed question of building was finally settled, and the construction of a second edifice — the present meetinghouse — actually began.”

Improvements and repairs are nothing new. The meeting house was at the mercy of the elements until 1822, when a stove was installed in the 26th pew.

In 1824 “subscriptions were solicited” — the 19th-century version of the modern fundraising drive — to paint the meeting house and buy a bell.