Reprinted from the March 11, 2011, issue of the Harvard Press
Editor’s note: With thoughts of moving government offices elsewhere and returning Town Hall to its historic role as a community center in the news, it seemed appropriate to revisit this history of the many ways the building has been used. Its role as the seat of municipal government is relatively new, preceded by years of mixed use as a vault, a police station, a fire station and civic center.
Walk out the back door of Town Hall, across the wide pavement area, into the door of the old fire station; dial the combination, and pull open the large, heavy steel door. This is the routine Town Clerk Janet Vellante follows several times during the course of a week to access the town vault. On its steel shelves are stored the invaluable records of the history of the town and its citizens, dating back to 1732. Until recently, the vault was an integral part of the town house, never separate from it.
Harvard’s first town house was built in 1828, across Ayer Road from the present Town Hall and facing south. According to Nourse in his “History of Harvard,” on March 30, 1854, the selectmen were instructed to buy a safe “wherein to bestow the town records.” To conserve space, a committee was appointed to examine the books and papers in the Town Clerk’s office and to save those that were valuable and “destroy all that are worthless.” Nourse bemoans the short-sightedness of this charge, feeling that it accounts for the fact that there are no files of papers relating to the town’s affairs in the early period of its history.
Insufficiently commodious for social events
For 40 years the first town hall served the requirements of ordinary town meeting, “but for many social uses it was not easily adaptable, nor commodious enough” (Nourse). The suggestion that a larger building for public meetings replace the old one “excited the determined opposition of all the conservatives in the town. The fact that the town debt was about $11,000 gave force to the arguments for further delay” (Nourse). The proposal to immediately build a new hall came to a vote in March of 1870: 94 in favor, 94 against. A second day brought a new vote, and this time the project won by a margin of seven.
The first meeting in the new Town Hall was April 1, 1872. The fireproof vault was built in 1881. Furnaces were added in 1885, and 10 years later the roof was slated and a hardwood floor laid in the upper hall; that same year, a public-private partnership purchased a Steinway piano, with $400 appropriated by the town and $165 contributed by individuals.
Records at the Harvard Historical Society show that well into the 20th century, most of the town officials still worked out of their homes. The lower floor of Town Hall was a big open room, with a kitchen in the back. Town meetings, elections, community suppers and other events were held here.
Fowl play
The late Mario Barba, in a speech on the occasion of the town’s 250th anniversary, reminisced about the Harvard he knew growing up. He recalled that the school sponsored numerous clubs; one of them, the Harvard Poultry Club, held a show every February in lower Town Hall. “Hundreds of birds, all in special cages, were exhibited, all cackling, crowing, or laying eggs. When I was a selectman, I swear I could hear them cackling during long, boring meetings.” At the front of the building, under the stairs, were a cloak room on one side and the town vault on the other. (One presumes the Town Clerk was in the room with the vault, not with the cloaks.) Upper Town Hall was used for performances, many of which were a source of revenue for the town, and for dances, Garden Club flower shows, Grange meetings, and other events.
Sometime in the mid-1900s, the cloak room became the selectmen’s office, and other offices were created in the large open area on the first floor. The second floor now became the place for elections and town meetings. It also continued as a performance space and a gathering and exhibit space for town organizations. From 1914 to 1926, before St. Theresa’s was built, Upper Town Hall served as the place for Mass on Sundays. One of the second-floor front rooms was used for cloaks, the other for the police.
From police station to meeting room
Since 1899, a small garage at the back of the building had housed the town firefighting apparatus. When the old horse sheds to the west of Town Hall were torn down, a fire station was built on the site in 1921. The police moved into the space that the fire equipment had vacated. When the Public Safety Building was built in 2003, the former police station in Town Hall became a meeting room.
When Janet Vellante became town clerk, 17 years ago this May, she worked in the front office under the stairs on the right. She recalls how cramped the space was; to get at her files, she needed to move her computer table out of the way. The vault was across the foyer, under the other set of stairs. Through the inside double doors was a center hallway, off of which were offices: the assessor and town administrator on the right, treasurer’s offices on the left. The lunch area was around the back corner in the hall.
Space became more and more of an issue, and Town Hall was finally renovated in 1995. During that summer, all staff was put on the second floor, where Vellante recalls, “we sweltered,” and files were stored in off-site trailers. Downstairs, walls were removed and a large, open space was created once again. The former vault room became a handicapped bathroom, and the town clerk’s office now extended on both sides of the inside double doors. Upper Town Hall was partitioned into offices for the town administrator and for land-use offices and the Board of Health.
Costs and benefits of 1995 renovation
Vellante says that the renovation allowed the staff to become much better informed about one another’s work. All employees went through cross training so that they can overlap with one another and better serve the public’s needs. Another plus of the change is that there is now a dedicated lunchroom and employees no longer need to eat in an open hallway.
However, the renovation rendered the offices on the second floor inaccessible to anyone with mobility issues. With the large open area on the first floor comes a lack of privacy. If a citizen is having trouble meeting a bill, there is no private place where this can be discussed. Over the years, space has once again become an issue; more and more file cabinets and boxes full of papers have found their way to the second floor for storage. And, in all the renovation, there was no provision made for the vault to remain inside the building. For the first time in almost 150 years, the town vault is housed in a separate building.
Since the old fire station had been replaced in 1974, there was room in the old building for the vault. Behind its steel door, the vault has four ceiling-high sections of shelves and is climate controlled for temperature and humidity. Because there is no secure storage for temporary records in Town Hall, the vault is more crowded than it should be, making it difficult to maneuver. Invaluable history is stored here—vital records, deeds of town properties, church records, tax and cemetery records.
Preserving Harvard’s past
The record books are not only historically informative, they are also works of art, written in beautiful cursive with sepia ink. Vellante explains that the early books are in fragile condition, and there is an on-going preservation program, with annual funding from Community Preservation Commission. It costs around $1,000 to have a book preserved, which involves taking the book completely apart, cleaning, and conditioning it. While they await their turn for restoration, the earliest books are kept in custom-made boxes to stabilize them.
Also housed in the vault is a handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence; such a document was given to all towns. In 1866 town records ceased to be written in a single book and began to be printed yearly in a separate book. The vault has a complete (except for 1924) set of annual reports. Reading through them is a delightful avenue to the past. One can learn that in 1866 the town liquor agent, who was paid a salary of $40, listed a complete inventory of the “liquor and casks on hand.” The expense for “breaking roads,” (plowing) is listed, as are all of the bills the town paid during the year.
Also in the vault, along with back-up discs and checks, are the voting machine and past election tapes, all ballots that included a state or federal election (stored in sealed bins for 22 months), and the Time Capsule from the 250th anniversary of the town in 1982. One wonders where the town vault will be housed when that capsule is opened on June 29, 2032.
A dual purpose captured in photographs
Back in Town Hall, a pair of old photographs flanks the landing on the way to the second floor: Henry Warner and Edwin Hildreth, two of Harvard’s most generous benefactors. Warner left a legacy of an annual series of cultural programs, free to all residents. Hildreth, with his brother Stanley, laid water pipes to the town center, the foundation of our present water system. These two men seem to represent the dual purpose that Town Hall traditionally served: providing for the social, cultural life of the community and addressing the civic needs of the town.
