TROY, Maine — Since the Troy Union Church was built 175 years ago on the Bangor Road, its bell has rung out countless times to mark important moments in the town.
But the bell has essentially been silent since July 4, 1976, because the church’s rotting, listing bell tower has made it unsafe to ring it vigorously. On Thursday morning, May 12, the long silence was broken when the bell rang while being lowered to the ground by a 30-ton crane. As it rang, the crew of hardworking men and a small crowd watching the show from across the road spontaneously burst into cheers.
The joyful noise of the old bell seemed to underscore a sense of optimism that the long effort to restore the historic, Greek Revival church is really getting somewhere good at last.
“It’s been a long time since the bell was rung,” said Jan Copley, who lives across the street from the church and who has attended services there for many years. “I think the restoration can’t be done soon enough.”
So far, a small group of parishioners led by Norma Rossel of Troy has spent six years and raised $107,000 to fix the church, which has been listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Rossel has applied for and received thousands of dollars in grants and spearheaded a church capital campaign to raise local dollars to assess, stabilize and replace the rotten tower. Although the work may still take a couple of years to complete, what happened Thursday is exciting to the Troy Union Church congregants and restorers alike. The workers used the crane to carefully lift off the bell and the remains of the rotten bell tower, work that has to be done before the tower can be rebuilt.
“If people don’t take care of their heritage, it’s gone,” Rossel said. “Now, it’ll last another 200 years.”
Arron Sturgis of Preservation Timber Framing, a Berwick-based company that specializes in traditional repair of steeples, barns and timber-framed homes, has been working on the restoration effort for several years. He looked pleased as the work progressed — carefully — Thursday.
“It’s always a little dangerous. When you have a damaged building of this degree, something could come apart. It’s extremely rotten,” he said. “Everything to date has just been preparation. Now we’re in the middle of the river, and we can’t stop now.”
Because the church has a tiny congregation of just a dozen or so people and doesn’t have the money to pay his company to do the whole job, Sturgis and his crew trained three local carpenters to do some of the work. The men were employed all winter building wooden trusses to replace the rotten ones, and one of them is storing the cast iron bell at his home until the replacement trusses and the rest of the bell tower components can be put in place. That should happen soon, Rossel said — perhaps by early June.
“The goal here was to save money by training and employing local craftsmen,” Sturgis said, adding that he hopes the skills they learned can be used on other projects. “There’s so much church steeple work in Maine right now, we couldn’t begin to do it all.”
After the bell tower has been replaced and the church’s structural integrity has been restored, Rossel and the congregation will work on fixing the sanctuary, which is gutted and is unusable. The Troy Union Church is clearly a work in progress, but bit by bit, it is getting there.
“It’s not about the building. It’s about the people and the faith,” explained Sandy Fernald of Troy, a church member who watched the bell get lifted down. “But it’s great, the restoration and the legacy. Everyone is so quick to tear buildings down and put up a double-wide [trailer], but history is important. We’re thinking about the future generations.”