The former Independent Order of Odd Fellows Hall, George Washington Lodge No. 23, in Pembroke is about to get a new lease on life. After a long wait for new ownership, the efforts of the Tides Institute & Museum of Art (TIMA) and Portland‑based Maine Preservation have culminated in the purchase of the hall by Severine von Tscharner Fleming, a farming champion and activist. While she has been based out of the Champlain Valley of New York, she plans to live locally and will be repairing and restoring the hall over a phased timeline starting this fall.
     Hugh French, executive director of TIMA, explains the role his nonprofit had in connecting the new owner with the building. "A couple of years ago, TIMA got Maine Preservation involved with the Odd Fellows Hall building as part of Maine Preservation's Protect and Sell Program for Historic Properties. Later when Severine expressed interest in Washington County we told her about the building and had her get in touch with Maine Preservation. Sale of the Odd Fellows Hall through this Maine Preservation program includes a protective covenant that will preserve the historic integrity of the building."
     The first order of business is to weatherproof the building, says von Tscharner Fleming. On a recent weekend she was inside the building, climbing on cabinetry to close and lock the tall windows, shake the dust off of Odd Fellows raiment left behind, which will be carefully cataloged and preserved, and noted some vandalism that had occurred since she had last been in town. Work on the roof, gutters, masonry flashing and the windows needs to happen before winter blows in.      While the building's immediate needs must be met to keep the interior from deteriorating further, it's the long‑term preservation and reuse of the old hall that have her smiling and talking a mile a minute.
     Von Tscharner Fleming is no stranger to hard work. The farmer, activist and organizer has founded four nonprofits and is involved with the Center for New Economics, The Greenhorns, the Agrarian Trust, and the open‑source resource for farmers, Farmhack. She was also involved in founding the Pomona Organic Farm, the UC Berkeley's Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology, and the National Young Farmers Coalition. She plans to continue her work building the young farmer movement from her new location and learning from local experience about the area's agrarian past. "I'm here, ready to work. If you have a hall or grange, come say hi," she says with enthusiasm.
     With The Greenhorns, von Tscharner Fleming has worked with a number of granges to preserve oral history and grange songs and begun the conversation of how to bring new farmers and life to the traditional organizations. "I don't have an answer," she says. "But I'm ready to be in the middle. So if we create something that works," she pauses and adds that replication models aren't quite the answer she's after given the unique nature of local agriculture, but they can be developed and adapted to meet local needs.
     The hall has two floors of mostly open space. The 3,600-square-foot space, with tall ceilings, large windows and an interior heavily decorated with varnished woodwork, will eventually be home to a 9,000-volume library of the country's agricultural history. In addition, von Tscharner Fleming is researching the possibilities of creating a youth summer camp that will focus on the local agricultural and fisheries history and an artist and writer residency, performance space and more. While funds need to be raised, her tentative goal for completion is 2020. "I'm taking it one step at a time. It's an expensive project. We want to do it right, which means historically appropriate."
     French says, "There are very few historic fraternal lodge buildings that are so intact as the Odd Fellows Hall and very few that have such extensive intricate woodwork as found on this building's second floor lodge hall. It is a very unique, one‑of‑a‑kind building. Its loss would have been tragic. We applaud Severine's purchase of the building and what she is attempting to do with it."
     The project also means cataloging and recording the local history of the people who used the hall for so many years. The new owner says, "I feel that these granges and halls need to be preserved. There are thousands of them around the country. They are critical cultural infrastructure." She plans to create a nonprofit for the building, possibly a 501c6, which is used for lodge organizations.
     "I would really like to get to know other grange and hall owners," she stresses. Contact von Tscharner Fleming at <severine@thegreenhorns.org>.