For 175 years, the Troy Union Church, built in 1840, has been a landmark on Bangor Road. Once a dusty thoroughfare that carried travelers between the commercial hub of Bangor and the state capitol at Augusta, Route 202 now runs close by the battered doors of the old church.
Norma Rossel has lived down the road since 1982 in a homey antique farmhouse she shares with her boat-builder husband, Greg. In 2009, when she was 62, she retired from her 28-year career as a seed technologist at Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Winslow.
“I had a nice summer working in my garden,” she recalled of that first season off the clock. “But then I got interested in restoring the church.”
The church still stands remarkably straight on its hand-hewn timbers, but the old bell tower cants visibly off to the rear because of deteriorating support timbers. Inside, a series of make-do repairs, remodelings — including a hung ceiling installed in the 1950s to reduce heating costs and layers of wallpaper that hold the original horsehair plaster together — have disguised decades of worsening damage from the leaky roof and rattling windows while diminishing the period charm of the sanctuary. A worn wall-to-wall carpet installed in the 1970s conceals the original wide-board floor.
The church has been part of Rossel’s life since she moved here.
“I used to walk up there for services,” she said. “It’s officially nondenominational, but almost all the ministers have been Methodists.”
Over the years, she has watched the slow decline of the congregation, which stands at about 12 members who attend regularly, with an average age of about 60. There’s a mailing list of about 150 names, she says, but many are just keeping in touch for old times’ sake and some may have died.
“People just don’t do church anymore,” she said, sighing.
Everyone in the community acknowledged the church’s precarious status, she said, but nobody had any money or knew where to look for help. The turning point came when the congregation decided it was time to paint the suspended acoustic tiles of the “new” ceiling. This was necessary in order to cover the water stains from the leaky roof high above, Rossel said, especially the section near the bell tower, which had rotted badly.
But a coat of paint was not the solution.
“The church needed real help or it was going to fall over on the ground,” she said, stressing each word. Someone had to take charge.
“I’ve always been an involved kind of person,” she said. “I’m political. I join things. I’m a leader. I really like being active and meeting new people and learning new things.”
So she kicked off the Troy Union Church Restoration Project and ran with it.
Baby boomer volunteers a key resource
Rossel is one of thousands of Mainers who each year donate time, interest and expertise to projects that enhance life for others.
According to statistics from the federal Corporation for National and Community Service , 32.5 percent of all Maine residents volunteered in one way or another between 2011 and 2013, ranking the state higher than the national average of about 25 percent and 13th among the 50 states and Washington, D.C.
The organization tracks organized volunteer rates and informal, self-reported service, such as helping neighbors or co-workers during times of distress. It is particularly focused on the volunteer potential of the burgeoning “baby boom” generation, born between 1946 and 1964.
For Mainers in the boomer generation, the rates are higher. In this group, 33.9 percent volunteered between 2011 and 2013, compared with the national average of 28.1 percent.
“Boomers today are entering their later years with a broad range of skills, talents and experience — as well as with a set of attitudes, expectations and needs that is decidedly different from previous generations,” a 2007 report on the organization’s website reads. “Harnessing those skills and accommodating those expectations will be critical to solving a wide range of social problems in the years ahead.”
The report finds that baby boomers volunteer at higher rates than past generations. Religion remains a top focus for volunteering, but after that, boomers are more likely to sign on with educational or social service concerns than with the civic, professional or international projects that engaged earlier generations. They also are more likely to volunteer in a variety of settings, less likely to stay on in situations where they don’t feel challenged or appreciated and more likely to also donate money to the organizations and causes where they volunteer.
Fundraising is the most popular organized boomer volunteer activity in Maine, according to the organization’s data, followed by general labor and then professional and managerial services.
Managing the Troy church project
Rossel got started by researching other restoration projects in Maine, including the Mill at Freedom Falls in Freedom and the restoration of the steeple at the Stockton Springs Community Church. She learned about the Maine Steeples Project, a collaborative project of Maine Preservation and the Maine Community Foundation. She researched and documented the church’s history and got it listed in the National Register of Historic Places — a critical qualification for seeking funding. She applied for and received foundation grants and, through a church capital campaign, helped raise matching local dollars for the first phase of the project — a total of nearly $40,000 for assessment and stabilization.
Now she’s working on funding for Phase Two, which, for about $96,000 includes replacing the rotten tower and support structures, along with making essential repairs to the roof.
Only after the structural integrity has been restored will Rossel turn to the more visible task of restoring the sanctuary. She hopes the work will be largely completed sometime in 2018, almost 10 years after she took the project on.
It’s a lot of work and long-term, big-picture thinking. Rossel takes it in stride.
“I like getting done what needs to be done,” she said.
ENCore Leadership Corps: Supporting older volunteers
Volunteers such as Rossel, who take on a project and guide it through to completion, reflect a growing trend in volunteerism, according to Jennifer Crittenden, assistant director of the University of Maine Center on Aging.
Crittenden also manages the ENCore Leadership Corps, a program through the Center on Aging that provides training and support to Mainers 50 and over who want to give back to their communities, satisfying goals of their own in the process.
Rossel connected early on with ENCore and made good use of its services, Crittenden said.
“People like Norma are not connected with any specific organization, but they’re out there on their own making their communities a better place,” Crittenden said. Baby boomers, in particular, often prefer to solve a problem and be given the autonomy to come up with solutions, she said, rather than be assigned a set of tasks on a schedule.
“Often, they are still working or have other commitments, so being able to shape how they engage is really important,” she said.
In addition, boomers typically are interested in learning new skills and networking with a new group of people, often with an eye toward stepping into a new career.
The ENCore program equips them for success, with workshops on writing grants, working with a nonprofit board and other relevant skills. The program serves more than 250 volunteers across the state and provides guidance to nonprofit agencies looking to recruit skilled and committed volunteers.
Rossel is quick to acknowledge the help she has received through ENCore, as well as from foundations, preservation experts, builders and other groups she has worked with. Her work has brought her closer to her community as well.
“Volunteering is all about building relationships,” she said. “You really can’t do this work by yourself; you need people to help you.”
She looks forward to the day when the Troy Union Church, whose Sunday services have been moved to another location during the project, once again opens its doors as a place of worship and a center of village life.
Its future is uncertain though, she admits.
“Maine is the least churched state in the country,” she said, citing a 2012 Pew Research Center study of self-reported rates of prayer and religious affiliation, “and we’re in the least churched county in Maine. But we really like being in the building, and, by golly, we’re going to keep having church there as long as we can.”
The foundations supporting the restoration require regular public access, she said, and the finished space will be ideal for art exhibits, concerts, quilt shows, lectures and other cultural events.
“There is a spirit in this place,” Rossel said, looking around the construction zone that is the church now. “You can make a community out of that. It brings people together. And at the very least, when this is over, we’ll have an interesting historic building.”
