What's New

With a $50,000 state grant made possible by State Sen. Vincent Leibell (R-Patterson), the Meeting House is undergoing a brand new set of renovations to help insure the colonial landmark and cradle of Pawling history is maintained for future generations.

"We take good care of that old lady," chuckled Nada Davis, president of the historical society, standing outside the meeting house last Thursday.

At the center of the new makeover is Hudson Valley Preservation, a design and build firm based in Sherman, Conn., specializing in both historical and modern renovations in the Hudson Valley and Connecticut. The firm and its founder Mason Lord have worked closely with the Oblong Meeting House since the early 1990s when Lord engineered a nine-month major structural restoration of the building.

The newest project has been a complete restoration of the more than 20 distinctive sash windows that peer into the building on all four sides, in addition to some delicate shingle work on the building's eastern side.

"In 1993 we got involved with the meeting house because I called up someone from the Quaker Hill Historical Society and they said their building was in trouble and they needed help," explained Lord, who founded HVP in 1991 after apprenticing as a restoration craftsmen with the National Trust for Historic Preservation at Lyndhurst.

"We put a whole new foundation under it, a whole new floor system in because it had rotted," he said, explaining that at the time dramatic settling had caused the back corner of the house to sink a foot lower than the rest of the structure. The project required the building to be physically lifted in order to repair the foundation.

"We had this building up, three sides were up in the air," said Lord. Several decrepit floorboards also were replaced at the time with white pine board courtesy of several tornado-ravaged trees from Cathedral Pines Farm in Cornwall, Conn.

As HVP nears the end of construction on the current project, Lord said the building is still is in need of a lot of work, in particular a planned reshingling of the other three sides of the structure pending further funding being sought, which would go a long way to remedying the bat problem. The new windows, in the meantime, have done a lot toward preserving the aesthetics of the house.

"Before the work started these windows, especially on the east end of the building, were just totally falling apart," said Lord. "Window panes were out, they were missing pieces, there was a lot of rot."

"Now that we know what needs to be done we're definitely going after more money," said Davis.

Searching for Clues" During the restoration of the 1767 Quaker Meeting House the old ghost of the original molding profile was discovered on the original clapboards buried beneath the more recent (Late 19th Century) shingled siding.

Energy savings
In regard to energy efficiency, he said the project and the concept behind it has broader applications for more recently built homes as well.

"A lot of people think if they have old windows they should replace them because they're a big heat loss area but it's really not the windows themselves," said Lord. "There's ways to save the windows and then do an interior storm window or an exterior storm window.

"They conserve the heat but the original sash conserves the aesthetics of the building. Otherwise you're changing the character of the structure. There's a lot of tightening up of things you can do that isn't necessarily major.

"And you're losing heat in other areas of your house besides just the windows but everyone goes for those," he said, mentioning attic areas and recessed fixtures as prime examples. The key to a successful renovation project he said is conducting accurate diagnostic evaluation before you start pulling apart the walls.

"We've developed a process to prevent that where we do something called an x-ray," he said. "We investigate portions of a house or the whole house to figure out what's wrong with it before getting into construction."

History
According to Historical Society records, the Oblong Meeting House was built by Quakers in 1764 to accommodate the growing religious community that had grown too large for the previous meeting house that had once stood on the same property as the current structure.

As strong abolitionists, the Pawling Quakers and their meeting house garnered special historical attention in 1769 for being the first governing body in the country to free slaves, nearly 100 years before the Emancipation Proclamation.

Ten years later, a new chapter of history was written for the meeting house when it was taken over by General George Washington's officers and used as a military hospital. Several Revolutionary soldiers are even buried across the street from the house.

In 1828 the Quaker community divided into the conservative Orthodox and progressive Hicksite Societies of Friends, with the more numerous Hicksites retaining the Meeting House property. The Orthodox group meanwhile erected their own meeting house in 1831, which is now a private residence, just 200 feet to the northwest. By the latter half of the 19th century however, meeting house membership had declined to the point that by 1885, meetings were discontinued. In 1936 the Historical Society acquired the property.

To set foot within the house today is to take a step back in time in a building that's remained mostly the same since the colonial era from the 19th century furnace and stovepiping to the handmade 17th century pews etched with ancient graffiti.

"We've worked on a lot of buildings but never one like this," said Lord. "This is really a unique structure here. It has no electricity, it has no plumbing, it's virtually unchanged from the 1760s."

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