Residents in rural western Massachusetts got some holiday shopping done at an historic site over the weekend - and they helped support a project looking to bring a community hub back to their corner of the Hilltowns.
It's been almost 200 years since the old Williams’ general store in Goshen saw customers popping in to look at wares and buy up goods.
Nestled in the historic Williams-Boltwood building in the center of town, retail business returned to the space, if only for Saturday as members of the Williams-Boltwood Trust put on a special holiday bazaar.
Coats, wrapping paper and Christmas ornaments were for sale as dozens of locals shuffled in and out of the tiny space, making it a literal "Small Business Saturday."
With restoration work ongoing, much of the store's room was limited - putting shoppers in close contact with sleds, snowshoes and a big jug of nails.
"So, you adopt a nail - they're numbered, so you can adopt it, we'll keep the nail, and when it's time to hammer them into the floor when we replace the floor, you can volunteer to hammer your nail in,” explained Trust Communications Director Melanie Lamere from behind the general store’s counter.
The whole holiday market is the latest in an effort to support and restore the massive two-story house that dates back to the late 1700's - first built even before Goshen's incorporation, back when the area was part of Chesterfield.
Throughout its early history, the space served the community in more ways than one - acting as a meeting place, a general store, home to a post office, a tavern and more, plus hosting Goshen's first annual town meeting in 1782.
In the years that followed, the businesses would close, with the massive house taking on boarders through the 1800s, going through multiple inheritors before the later heirs, the Babcock family, wished to donate it to the town.
The non-profit trust was established in 2009 and ownership was transferred in early 2022.
Originally intended to preserve the structure and the artifacts in it, Trust Chair Kammille Oborne tells WAMC her team is looking to do more than keep the structure intact.
“The job is monumental - it will take us decades to do it, but what we're trying to do is to bring it back to 21st century use, so the store will be a store again for artists and makers,” she explained, pointing out how the bazaar also featured the blacksmithing works of one of its first makers, hilltown resident, Isaac Stewart.
Project plans include turning the former tavern into a spot for small concerts and lectures and converting a pair of parlors into a community meeting space - all while preserving much of the structure as a museum of sorts.
A year prior, the efforts secured around $108,000 in Community Preservation Act funds to start mapping out the rehabilitation work.
Some of those funds also went towards the project's most pressing matters as well - emergency repairs.
Before headway can be made on the project's bigger goals, Oborne says a number of crucial repairs and replacements are more pressing.
“The northern corner of the building took on a lot of water damage, especially after Route 112 was revamped, and with changing climate patterns, we’re getting water runoff in the winter, so there's a lot of rot in the beams there,” she said. “That has to be replaced, it's not safe to walk in that part of the building. Unfortunately, that's the oldest part of the building - and the entire structure needs a new roof. Those are urgent needs, to the tune of, probably, both of those together, close to $100,000.”
Early estimates for the overall project have a price tag of over a million dollars - making donations and events like the holiday bazaar crucial to the effort.
The project also relies on volunteers – it has a gift wishlist for 2025 that includes folks making pledges to mow the large front lawn, help organize the couple thousand volumes that made up the library and even sew up an 1800s costume.
Among those helping is Kim Dresser - whose own family has a long history of tending to the property.
“A lot of the older families in town have ties into this place and there's a lot of us still left,” said Dresser, a longtime local EMT and retired deputy chief of the Goshen Fire Department. “The town has changed immensely over the years. When I was a kid, we were a farming community – there were 13 working farms."
With a family history that goes back to 1769, he showed WAMC a photo found among the 5,000 volumes from the library - a century-old picture of not just some of the Boltwood family but several Dressers posing in front of the front entrance, including his great-great-grandmother, Alice Montgomery Pierce Dresser.
Having worked on the house himself in the past alongside his father, Francis, even installing a security system at one point in the 70s, he says he loves seeing the restoration work underway now.
As that continues, Oborne says, so does work to secure grants and further support, especially with hopes of going beyond just the main structure.
“Our long-term goals, beyond fixing up this building, there's a connector barn that we want to renovate to look exactly as it did and we're going to put accessible restrooms and a small production kitchen/commercial kitchen in there for our local farmers that now have to drive to Greenfield to use their kitchen,” she says. “And then we would like to do some new construction in the same style off the back, to have a larger meeting space that would accommodate weddings and such.”
