The room has heard a lot of voices in its 175 years. On Friday, Oct. 30, at 7 p.m., it will hear a few more.
Chesterville Poetry Night returns to the Center Union Meeting House at 3 Borough Road, an evening that invites local poets and poetry enthusiasts to read their own work or simply sit and listen. Admission is free. The event is open to participants of all ages and abilities, and light refreshments will be served. The building is accessible to people with disabilities. For more information, call 207-770-0660 or visit chestervillemeetinghouse.org.
It is, on its face, a modest thing: a handful of neighbors in a small town, one autumn evening, taking turns at the front of a room. But the setting is not incidental, and neither is the tradition.
The Center Union Meeting House was built in 1851, on a parcel of land conveyed to the Chesterville Union Meeting House Society by Joseph A. Linscott and William Hutchins for a total of $33. It is one of two parish houses remaining in Chesterville, the other being the current Baptist Church in the village of North Chesterville. According to the meeting house's own history, the building remains largely unchanged to this day — which is to say that the poets who read there this fall will stand in essentially the same space, under the same ceiling, as the congregations and gatherings that came before them.
Chesterville itself is a far-flung town of some 1,300 people in Franklin County, first settled in 1782 and incorporated in 1802. An 1837 gazetteer described it as "an excellent township of land" that yielded 4,046 bushels of wheat in that year. Wilson's Stream passes through the town and empties below the falls of the Sandy River. The town's villages include Chesterville, North Chesterville and part of Farmington Falls — a geography of hills and hollows that makes any gathering a small act of assembly.
That geography is part of what makes the poetry night what it is. In a note accompanying a published collection of the readings, the meeting house's board described the event's appeal in exactly those terms: a small group gathers one evening in autumn "to share a few poems each, and to delight in the talent and creativity that turns out from every hill and hollow throughout our far-flung town."
The tradition is now well over a decade old. By 2017, when the board published "Chesterville Center Union Meeting House 3rd Annual Poetry Readings," the event had already become, in the board's words, "an officially established tradition." That 72-page volume collected poems read by Chesterville poets, their relatives and friends, along with native art and photography submitted by residents — a record of what the town sounded like that year. The board framed the book as a way to help "this small non-profit organization to continue this tradition and foster new ways for the community to enjoy a beautiful, historic and very accommodating building for generations to come."
The meeting house has since become a year-round community resource rather than a strictly religious one. It is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) entity with no religious affiliation, and it hosts lectures, presentations and performances alongside the annual poetry evening. In September 2019, for instance, it partnered with the Chesterville Heritage Society to bring John Mosher, an archaeologist for the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, to speak about the commission's findings at the Routes 41 and 156 bridge site over the Sandy River in Farmington Falls — fieldwork that had turned up evidence of an Amesokanti village, a circa 1795 cellar on the front lawn of the Nazarene Church parsonage, and numerous mill remains on the Chesterville side of the bridge.
That is the kind of programming the building's supporters have in mind: local history, local talent, local company, no admission charge. The poetry night fits the pattern precisely. There is no jury, no theme, no requirement that anyone be published or polished. The invitation, as the board has put it, is simply an open one to all Chesterville residents — bring a poem or a story, or bring nothing and listen.
For anyone who has never been, the meeting house is easy to find: 3 Borough Road, Chesterville, with restrooms on site and full accessibility for those with mobility impairments. The reading begins at 7 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 30, and runs about an hour. Refreshments are free, the seats are free, and the poems — some of them, at least — will be brand new.