On the first Tuesday of October, the door of a white clapboard meeting house on York Street in Lyndon, Vermont, swings open to the smell of casseroles and the sound of tuning guitars. The potluck starts at 5:30 in the evening; by 6:30, the tables are pushed aside and the strumming begins. This is Strum Club, a free, all-ages gathering that has become a small ritual of the Northeast Kingdom's darker months — a monthly excuse to eat together, play together, and wait out the winter.
The event is presented by Catamount Arts, the St. Johnsbury-based arts organization founded in 1975. But Strum Club is not really a Catamount production in the conventional sense. It is hosted by the Elliott family. Siblings Rachael and Matthew Elliott facilitate the music; Matthew's wife, Val, produces the community potluck. The arrangement is deliberately informal. Song charts are provided, so no one needs to read music, and participants are welcome to bring a tune or two of their own to share with the group. Guitarists, instrumentalists, singers, and people who simply want to listen are all invited, and the organizers are explicit that all ages, instruments, and skill levels are welcome.
The Elliotts' framing of the season is telling. Strum Club runs from October through March, a stretch they describe as going "from Stick Season to Sugaring Season." In Vermont, stick season is the bleak interval after the foliage has fallen and before the snow arrives, when the landscape turns gray and bare. Sugaring season is the late-winter thaw, when maple sap starts running and the sugarhouses fire up. The club's stated goal is to build community through the enjoyment of food, music, and company during those darker months — a modest ambition that, in a rural corner of the state, amounts to something closer to a lifeline.
The setting matters as much as the music. The York Street Meeting House was formerly the First Congregational Church of Lyndon, organized in 1817 by nine people who met in one another's homes until the church itself was built in 1829 for $4,000 — the equivalent of roughly $128,000 today. The building could seat about 300 worshipers comfortably. But by the 2000s, the congregation had shrunk back to its original size, and the structure was in rough shape, its steeple listing visibly to one side. Like many of the old white churches that give New England villages their character, it seemed destined for decay and eventual demolition.
What saved it was a group of Lyndon Corner community members who took matters into their own hands in 2008. Under the leadership of Jim Gallagher, a retired lawyer who drove past the failing church on his way to work each day, they formed the Upright Steeple Society — a Vermont nonprofit with a mission to salvage, repair, renovate, and restore the building and maintain it as a nonsectarian meeting house available for community functions. Gallagher later recalled thinking, "Somebody ought to do something about that." He became that somebody.
The rescue was neither quick nor cheap. It took eight years, countless volunteer hours, and about $400,000. Vermont Public reported in 2015 that the effort drew on an unlikely source of labor: inmates from a nearby correctional facility. By then the steeple no longer leaned, the foundation had been shored up, and the interior had been completely redone. The building still needed a coat of paint, but it had been pulled back from the brink.
The human stakes of that decline were concrete. As an interstate divided the community, the congregation drifted elsewhere, until only two members remained. One was Frances Taylor, whose family had fought hard to keep the doors open. "The money we had left wasn't enough to keep going," she told Vermont Public. "Daddy put a furnace in there and we used to have card parties once or twice a week to get the money just to do that." When her father died, the family could not hold his funeral in the church he had worked to sustain. "It made me crazy," she said. "It just made me crazy."
That history gives Strum Club a particular resonance. The building was saved so that it could be used again — as a live music venue, a public meeting facility, and, on first Tuesdays, a potluck hall. The Upright Steeple Society's mission of nonsectarian community use is not an abstraction; it is the reason a group of neighbors can now gather under a repaired steeple to sing.
The musical pedigree behind the club is more serious than its easygoing format might suggest. Rachael Elliott, one of the facilitators, is a bassoonist hailed by WQXR as "one of the sharpest executors of new-music currently on the scene" and by Time Out New York as an "intrepid bassoonist." A versatile performer active in classical, new music, improvised, and rock/pop settings, she has premiered works by composers including Amy Beth Kirsten, Bryce Dessner, Paul Lansky, Ingram Marshall, Padma Newsome, Thomas L. Read, and Beth Wiemann, and she teaches at Longy School of Music. Matthew Elliott is a guitarist and singer who performs around the Northeast Kingdom and maintains a private teaching studio there. The two have played together at the meeting house in other configurations, including a program with oboist Katie Oprea. In other words, the people leading a free, no-audition community strum are working musicians who have chosen to spend their first Tuesdays making room for beginners.
That choice is the heart of the thing. Strum Club has no ticket, no capacity limit, and no barrier to entry. It is accessible and open to the public. The format is old and durable: eat first, then play. The potluck is not a side dish to the music; it is the mechanism by which strangers become a group. Val Elliott's role in producing it is a reminder that the food is part of the programming.
The club meets on the first Tuesday of each month from October through March. The 2026-27 season opens Tuesday, October 6, 2026, with the potluck at 5:30 p.m. and the strumming at 6:30 p.m., and continues through March 2, 2027. The event listing gives the evening a 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. window, though the music itself begins at 6:30. For more information on Strum Club, other events at York Street Meeting House, or live music opportunities throughout the Northeast Kingdom, Catamount Arts can be reached at catamountarts.org or by phone at 802-748-2600.
There is a certain logic to a strum club in a building that nearly fell down. Both are exercises in keeping something alive through collective effort — the church through volunteer labor and $400,000 raised a little at a time, the club through a monthly casserole and a willingness to play badly in front of neighbors. The Elliotts' phrase for the season, "from Stick Season to Sugaring Season," captures the arc precisely. The gathering begins in the bleakest stretch of the year and ends just as the sap starts running. Between those two points, on the first Tuesday of every month, a historic meeting house fills with food and noise, and the dark months get a little shorter.