Meriden Town Hall

Site: N09-74
Municipality: Plainfield, NH
Location: Brook Road, Meriden
Site Type: Town Hall

In 1896, the town of Plainfield paid George Taylor Stockwell of Claremont (a great, great uncle of David H. Stockwell of Plainfield, 1991)(51) $2,000 to build a town hall in Meriden on a parcel of land purchased from Darius Moulton for $25. An additional amount of $13.93 was charged by Mr. Stockwell for "extras." George S. Cole and Orzo V. Eastman helped to prepare the site.(52)

The two-story frame building is forty by seventy-two feet and has a slate, hip roof and exterior clapboards. A seven by twelve foot covered porch with gabled roof is at the center front entrance. The main hall, with maple floor and waist high wainscoting has been used for movies, dances, roller skating, theater productions, craft sales, community parties, and town meetings. In back of the stage, at the north end of the building is a wood shed and primitive toilets. On either side of the front entrance are two small rooms on both the first and second floors. Frequently the downstairs rooms were used for the selectmen's office and at one time one was used for police headquarters. The upstairs rooms were used for a library at one time and now are storage space for town records. Two high brick chimneys are equal distant from the center at the forward section of the front. The main hall has similar window placement on the east and west sides consisting of three oversized windows nearly two stories in height. The front facade has two conventional sized windows with three above symmetrically arranged.

In the early 1930s, the building was heated by two wood stoves placed at the north end of the main hall with stove pipe extending the length of the hall to the chimneys at the south end. In the middle twentieth century, a gas furnace was installed with a small gas stove in the small, downstairs east room. In 1908, Fred A. Rogers was contracted to build a road machine shed to be attached to the rear ofthis building, as a cost of $67.57.53 In the late 1920s, the town hearse was stored in this road equipment shed along with the wooden snow roller.
(Source 165:401)