The Old Town Hall, at right, in its first location on The Common, in 1891
History
In December 1848, at its inaugural Town Meeting, it was agreed the Hall would be “opened without charge for all Political, Temperance, Antislavery & Peace Meetings and Lecturers for Lyceum, and Singing Schools, for Picnics, Fairs and Sabbath School celebrations and for all Literary & Scientific Lecturers.”
1848
The Old Town Hall was built in 1848 for $2,200 near the site of the present Bemis Hall. In 1852 Lincoln’s first High School was opened on the Hall’s first floor, and in the early 1870s the Hall became the site of Lincoln’s first Public Library.
1891
In 1884, with Lincoln’s present library completed and a new Town Hall — what is now Bemis Hall — built, the Old Town Hall was acquired from the town by James Lorin Chapin. In 1891 he moved the building downhill, adjacent to the “white church”, and maintained it as a General Store and Post Office for the next 27 years.
1918
Charles Sumner Smith bought the Old Town Hall and moved it to its present site at 25 Lincoln Road. It took several days to skid the building to its new location; throughout, its General Store remained open for business.
From the 1890s until 1918, the Old Town Hall was located just north of First Parish Church, and maintained by the Chapin family as a store and post office
Charles Sumner Smith in 1917
In 1931, Henry Ford attempted to purchase The Lincoln Old Town Hall in order to move it piece-by-piece to his museum of significant American architecture, Greenfield Village, in Dearborn, Michigan. Charles Sumner Smith refused, and Ford was left to build a near-replica of it on the museum's town green, in the company of the original Wright Brother's bicycle shop; the Logan County Courthouse, where Abraham Lincoln practiced law as a young man; the homes of Noah Webster, Robert Frost, Henry Ford, William Holmes McGuffey, and H.J. Heinz; Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory and complex; and the Ferris Mill — one of the oldest windmills in America, dating from 1633.
The Old Town Hall with gas pumps out front, c. 1960
A memorial service for Martin Luther King, Jr., led by the Rev. Charles Styron of First Parish Church in 1968