New lease on life for an old school Community ties, history help group save Orono building and part of a town’s past

The Birch Street School is the Shirley MacLaine of Orono – it keeps getting reincarnated. Over the course of a century, the building could have been razed many times. But townspeople keep bringing it back to life, as a school, a senior center, a meeting place, a thrift shop. In a town full of pretty, historic buildings, the hulking white structure doesn’t really stand out. It does its job quietly, tucked away on a downtown side street. So quietly, in fact, that many townspeople didn’t realize how integral it was to the fabric of the community until it faced certain destruction.

“At one point the town was thinking of tearing down the building,” said Michael Lewis, chairman of the Birch Street School Task Force. “The goal was to build a new, one-story building that would be a senior center.”

That new building left no room for the thrift shop, the Girl Scout troops, the Orono Housing Foundation, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, the garden group or the Orono Friends, a religious group that holds its weekly worship service there. Many people used the building, but few knew it.

“I think many of us were not really aware of how many volunteer programs were going on in that building,” said longtime Orono resident Sherman Hasbrouck. “We all learned a lot about the life of the building and its importance to the town.”

In 2001, a concerned patron put together a petition to save the thrift shop. Six hundred people signed it. The council formed the Thrift Shop Relocation Committee, but they couldn’t find an adequate space. The group called in engineers from the University of Maine to get a second opinion on an architect’s 1996 report that the structure was unsound. The engineers said the building was fine, but the roof needed to be fixed, so the committee proposed a renovation of the existing structure, which is scheduled to begin this summer. The relocation committee became the Birch Street School Task Force and its mission changed to include all of the related groups.

“Once we started talking about saving the building, there was incredible support,” Lewis said. “There seems to be a very, very strong community connection to the building.”

Town Council Chairwoman Lianne Harris said that connection is due, in part, to the building’s rich history.

“It has heard the voices of many people for many years in this community,” Harris said. “It certainly is a historic place in town and it’s a place where there’s social and emotional gathering.”

Its first life began in 1900, when the town bought land off a small downtown side street. The one-story, two-room schoolhouse went up in 1901. The population grew quickly, and in 1908, builder Claude Noyes expanded the structure in an unusual way – he raised the original building up the chimney and built from the ground up.

“It was a rather remarkable structure,” Hasbrouck said.

Its educational life ended in the early 1960s, when classes in Orono’s two neighborhood schools were moved to the new Asa Adams School. The building remained vacant until 1969, when The Housing Foundation started construction on a 40-unit elderly housing complex on land adjacent to the former school. The building’s second life, as a senior center, began shortly after that.

In the years that followed, the building’s appearance changed dramatically as soaring energy costs made the school’s expansive windows too impractical to keep. Vinyl siding went up and many windows were blocked out, leaving the hulking structure less attractive but more efficient.

The Orono Thrift Shop opened upstairs, as a fund-raiser for the Orono Health Association. The downstairs became a catchall for the community, serving not only the Housing Foundation and related senior programs, but Girl Scout troops, AA meetings and religious gatherings, among others.

In the ’80s and early ’90s, maintenance coasted along on a shoestring budget, and things fell into disrepair. The roof started leaking, as did the building’s original gutters, which run inside the walls so they won’t freeze in the winter. In 1996, the Town Council hired an architect to inspect the building, and he determined that the structure was unsound. When the Thrift Shop Relocation Committee brought in engineers from the university, they said the structure was sound, but they weren’t sure why, because the building’s unique style fits none of the techniques used today.

“Essentially, what we heard was this building was a good, solid building, and it’s pretty likely that we’ll be able to fix this roof,” Harris said.

The roof is the first phase in a multistage renovation planned for the building. The committee is also writing grants to make the building more accessible with a wheelchair lift, to put in more safety features, and to update the electric and heating systems. Though townspeople hope to restore the building to its original grandeur, with its soaring windows and bright-red clapboards, they need to take care of the essentials first.

“We’re not going to try at first to bring it back to the pristine condition it was in before,” Lewis said. “It’s going to be a modest renovation at first.”

The work may be modest at first, but the results won’t be. The renovations don’t need to be elaborate to keep this old school building alive.

“They’re disappearing and it’s a valuable historical record of this type of school,” Lewis said. “It’s got a really nice, solid dignity to it.”