NORTHAMPTON — Nearly a year ago, a more than 124-year-old medallion fell from the roof of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Northampton and Florence’s church, prompting a more than $250,000 ceiling repair and renovation project slated for completion this week.
Light poured through the church’s original stained glass windows into the 220 Main St. church Tuesday morning as scaffolding filled the nave from the floor to ceiling.
When the approximately 15-foot-long medallion fell from the ceiling last August, former Unitarian Universalist Society president and current volunteer project manager Jonathon Wright explained that church leadership found missing nails and “structural shortcomings” in the ceiling while trying to determine the cause of the accident.
“[We] took a look at the back of the plaster, and I’m really glad we did, because we found some structural shortcomings that we need to repair,” Wright said. “Some structural nails started to pull out after 120 years, if you could believe it.”
As a crew from Taylor Paint in Wilbraham stood on scaffolding securing the medallion with caulk on Tuesday, Wright said the ceiling’s structural issues were not believed to be significant enough to be considered at risk of collapsing, but still came at a significant cost to the congregation.
Since the congregation was ineligible for Community Preservation Act funding, the more than $250,000 yearlong project was funded entirely by the congregation, Unitarian Society President Terri HerrNeckar said. She added that the project was not just maintenance work, but also historical preservation.
“It’s a very expensive endeavor, and when you’re going to spend that much money, it requires the entire congregation to approve it by a two-thirds majority,” HerrNeckar said. “We went for higher than that. It passed by almost unanimous vote, but we had to have two meetings and vote twice to make sure that everybody was on board. We have a historic ceiling, that was part of the point … it’s not just safety, it’s also history.”
Wright explained that the church was first constructed in 1825 and was used primarily by those who wished to escape stringent Puritan traditions through a newer, more accepting religion. He said enlightenment-era thinkers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson were drawn to the new religion.
Although the original church burned down in 1902, Wright explained that aspects of the original building — its brick exterior and stained glass windows — survived the fire.
“Unitarian Universalism was an outgrowth in this country of people in the early 19th century, being tired and weary of the controlled, exclusively male-centered Puritan tradition. So what is called the Second Congregational Society became part of the humanitarian movement,” Wright said. “The great thinkers of that time were positing that we actually are all saved by our nature of being humans, not by the church.”
