The historic Willamette Community and Grange Hall was officially listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. Unfortunately, the few remaining members of the Grange have had challenges in coming up with the necessary funding to rehabilitate the old building, erected in 1923. The article highlights two sides of the issue at hand (and still an ongoing issue I believe today) and tell us:
GREENBERRY — On a frosty night in mid-December, a small group of Benton County residents braved icy roads and bone-chilling temperatures to gather in the half-basement of the Willamette Grange Hall in Greenberry, about 7 miles south of Corvallis, for a pre-Christmas potluck.
They sat around a long trestle table dressed up with a flower-print cloth, tea candles and a potted poinsettia and ate turkey and ham and fixings they’d brought from their own kitchens.
It was a cozy scene, but most of the diners were still wearing their winter coats. The old Grange hall is rarely used anymore, and the ancient wood-burning furnace takes awhile to warm the place up.
Truth is, the grand old building is in pretty sad shape. The roof needs work, big chunks of plaster are peeling off the walls and the foundation needs shoring up.
In the upstairs meeting hall, the wooden floors slope, the high ceiling sags and the walls lean outward from the base. Six 4-by-4 timbers are propped on the front of the stage to brace a drooping joist, and 13 logging cables tensioned by turnbuckles span the room at ceiling height, literally holding the building together.
But the 20 remaining members of Willamette Grange No. 52 refuse to give up on the place. For 80 years it’s been an important gathering spot in this crossroads farming community on Highway 99W, the successor to two earlier Grange halls that were gutted by fire.
Generations of Grangers have met here to hold meetings, elect officers and induct new members. The stately Georgian Revival saltbox has also hosted wedding receptions and birthday parties, dances and family reunions, speeches by visiting politicians and debates on the issues of the day.
A few years back, when the chapter had more members, there was a discussion about whether to invest a lot of money to repair the beloved old building or knock it down to make way for a new metal structure that would be far less elegant but far more practical.
The debate divided the Willamette Grange. Those who favored a new building stopped coming to meetings. Those who wanted to preserve the old one soldiered on.
“We all decided we would do our best to save this building rather than let it be torn down,” said Jim Gray, the Grange master.
“There’s an awful lot of people who feel that this building is a whole lot better than the sheep barn that could have replaced it.”
Steeped in history
The Order of Patrons of Husbandry, better known as the Grange, was founded in 1867 as a fraternal organization to represent the interests of American farmers. The movement spread quickly in the aftermath of the Civil War and soon arrived in Oregon.
Willamette Grange No. 52 was chartered in 1873, just 14 years after Oregon was admitted to the Union, and today it is the second-oldest active chapter in the state.
That history means a lot to people like Gray, who joined the Grange as a junior member in 1960. Since then he’s belonged to several different chapters around the valley and has served 10 two-year terms as master of the Benton Pomona, the Grange’s countywide regional umbrella group.
He and other members of the Willamette Grange got the Greenberry hall listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008, in hopes of attracting grant funding for restoration work. But it’s a tall order. An architectural study commissioned by Benton County at the time estimated it would take at least $200,000 to stabilize the building and make it safely habitable.
With a dwindling and aging membership base and less than $1,000 in the bank, the Willamette Grange is in no position to launch any major renovations. But Gray and others have volunteered their labor to keep the building from deteriorating further and have started looking into grant opportunities.
“The consensus has been we’ll keep muddling along,” Gray said.
Peggy Giles is one of his supporters. A longtime Grange member, she can recall all kinds of community gatherings in the Greenberry hall — including her own 50th birthday bash, held a decade ago with 200 friends and family members in attendance.
“It’s really a cool old building,” she said. “It could be good again. All it takes is some money and somebody with some direction to fix it up.”
John Dilles joined the Willamette Grange about six years ago and has taken it upon himself to organize some of the chapter’s business records. Among other things, he’s been involved in an effort to clear up an issue with the title to the building, which is technically held by a sister organization, the Willamette Community & Grange Association.
He thinks it might be possible to get some grant funding to help restore the building, but it’s been tough to get the effort off the ground.
“I’m turning 60 (in 2014), and I’m one of the younger members of the organization. And every year another member dies off,” he said ruefully.
“There’s a lot of interest (in restoration), but there isn’t really an plan or energy.”
Like Giles and Gray, he hopes that spreading the word about the historic building’s plight will help generate support to save it.
A difference of opinion
Russ Fredrickson has fond memories of the old building, too, but he just doesn’t see the sense in trying to save it.
While the holiday potluck was going on in the Grange hall basement, he was across the street in the Greenberry Tavern, sitting on a barstool and shaking his head.
“What’s going on now I don’t agree with one bit,” he said.
“I’m all for a community center, but the issue of trying to save that building ... all it is is a building.
“For way less money you could build a real, functional community building. But that’s just my opinion.”
That’s how Fredrickson felt during the debate over whether to restore the historic structure, when he was the Grange master of the Willamette chapter. Some of the larger farm operators in the area, Fredrickson said, were willing to make substantial donations to finance a new Grange hall, but restoring the old one seemed like a poor investment to them.
“There was money for a new building,” Fredrickson said. “There was no money to fix that building.”
Just across the bar, though, was a different opinion.
Katelyn Ayres runs the Greenberry Store and Tavern with her mother. They’ve only been in the area for about five years, but Ayres grew up in other rural Oregon towns where Grange halls were community hubs, and she wants to see the Greenberry hall restored.
“When I moved here I was like, oh my God, it’s so beautiful,” Ayres said.
She’s now a member of the Willamette Grange and goes to meetings when she can get the time off work. The tavern hosted a “Pints for a Cause” fundraiser in November that raised $350 for the restoration project, and Ayres said she’ll hold more in the future.
“I talk about it almost every day,” she said. “To see it actually alive again and be in use would be absolutely wonderful.”
Grange membership has ebbed and flowed over the years, hitting high-water marks of close to 800,000 on several occasions, according to National Grange Master Ed Luttrell, an Oregonian who lives near Sandy.
The last time that happened, though, was in the late 1950s. Farming in America has changed a lot since then, with many small operations being consolidated into large tracts, resulting in fewer farmers who might be interested in joining the Grange.
Today there are only about 170,000 Grangers in 2,000 chapters across 39 states.
Oregon’s 177 remaining Grange units have about 5,000 members, down from almost 30,000 as recently as the late 1990s, according to state Grange Master Susan Noah.
But Noah and Luttrell said the membership declines seem to have bottomed out and there are signs of a turnaround. Policy changes have made joining the Grange easier, they noted, and rising interest in sustainable agriculture and local food systems is attracting new members in some quarters, including urban areas.
“The numbers that we’re seeing now are really giving us a lot of energy and enthusiasm,” Luttrell said.
In 2013, he added, the Grange was re-established in three states where it had disappeared, and eight states showed net membership gains.
“We’re seeing Granges being revitalized all over the country, we’re seeing Granges restored and we’re seeing new Granges formed.”
Unfortunately, however, the Grange is not a wealthy organization. Luttrell said the national body doesn’t have the resources to help pay restoration costs for historic structures like the Willamette Grange Hall.
There could be some grant funding available through the Oregon State Grange Foundation, he added, which has a history of working with local chapters on fundraising campaigns.
That will require a concerted effort on the part of the Willamette Grange, and a unified front on the fundamental question of whether the Greenberry hall can and should be saved.
“Those decisions are never easy,” Luttrell said.
“They require people to look through a lot of emotion and a lot of history to decide what is the best solution.”
‘Good, solid wood’
Jim Gray has no doubts on that score.
On a tour of the Willamette Grange Hall, Gray was candid about how much work the old building needs. But he also called attention to the craftsmanship that went into its original construction in 1923, the full-dimension lumber and the solid, careful joins. A thing like this, he said, is worth saving for its own sake.
“There’s a lot of good, solid wood in it, and I’m somewhat appalled at the people who would (tear it down). That’s one of the things about this old building: You can’t buy materials this good anymore.”
At age 68, Gray still does his own logging on his spread west of Philomath, and he’s always up for a little heavy lifting. It was Gray who led the way on many of the temporary repairs to the building, such as stringing the cables to stabilize the walls, and now he’s thinking about how to go about jacking up the building’s sagging foundation.
He’s done it before, back in the late ’60s, when he helped shore up a barn that had settled too much on one side.
He figures maybe he can do the same thing with the Willamette Grange Hall.
“The last time I was past that old barn it was still standing,” Gray said. “And now it’s 40 years older than it would’ve been if we hadn’t fixed it.”