Some towns had money to spend. Several, including Durham, bought new rescue trucks, fire trucks or added to public safety buildings. Minot residents voted to buy a new backhoe and power mulcher. Greene residents will get a bigger library.

Things were more austere elsewhere. In Weld, for example, residents refused to spend $3,500 on a toilet for the town garage.

Thus began Maine’s town meetings, a spring ritual indigenous to New England that is America’s oldest political institution.

In colonial times, attendance at such meetings was compulsory for the male adults of a community. Throughout the 19th century, the annual town meeting day was considered the social event of the year for rural New Englanders. For the farmer and his family, it meant the end of the long isolation of winter.

Over the weekend, Limington voters quickly went through most of the 64 articles on the town warrant.

The one article generating the most debate was Article 64, which requires that no town employee be paid before his or her work has been performed. Voters approved it unanimously. Ray Webb, the local registrar of voters, said the vote was a backlash to the selectmen’s decision last year to approve some payroll requests before work was performed.

And so it was. Elsewhere, garages were stretched to house more trucks. Crumbling roads received makeovers. Some roads got new names.

Residents were generous to town workers, granting sizable raises in some cases. In Stoneham, the town clerk and treasurer got 19 percent pay hikes. When offered to the fire chief and his two assistants, they turned them down, for reasons unknown.