Chase Farm visitor center, schoolhouse get makeover
LINCOLN — The town has completed work on its new Visitor Center at Chase Farm and will be holding a fun-filled summer celebration event at the upgraded farm, at 671 Great Road, on July 22.
Not only is the new Visitor Center, with its modern public meeting room, now available for use, but also the renovated Hot Potato School one-room schoolhouse the
town moved to Chase Farm from the corner of Whipple and Angell roads in a separate project in 2015.
With the help of the Friends of Hearthside House and other local preservationists, the town has been able to restore the schoolhouse, once serving eight grade levels of students in its single classroom, to what it may have looked like before the town stopped using it as a school in 1922.
Alan Moreau, the town’s director of parks and recreation, said the grand opening of the Visitor Center will include a long list of family activities and town history-based offerings at Chase Farm and its neighboring preserved properties including Hearthside House, the Hannaway Blacksmith Shop, Moffett Mill and Saylesville Meeting House.
“We are excited about the new Visitor Center, that’s why we making the Summer Celebration its official opening,” he said. The day’s activities will include a ribbon cutting for the Visitor Center at noon, and tours of the Hot Potato School and the rest of the historic buildings throughout the day.
There will be a brief speaking program during the grand opening, including remarks by Town Administrator T. Joseph Almond, Moreau and other town officials, and also representatives of the state Department of Environmental Management, which contributed significant funding to the project.
The Visitor Center cost a total of $500,000, Moreau noted, but the DEM contributed an 80 percent matching grant of $400,000 to the project.
The new building, constructed by All-State Builders, is located near the Chase Farm parking lot off Old Great Road close by the new site of the Hot Potato School.
The two facilities have already been used by local school groups on field trips and were also open for an post-parade event at Chase Farm after the town’s annual Memorial Day Parade concluded at the farm.
“It was a huge success,” Moreau said of the Memorial Day event. “We had food trucks in attendance and there were live bands performing,” he said.
Town Administrator T. Joseph Almond said on Friday that he also is looking forward to the grand opening of the park facilities.
“I am very, very happy with the way it came out,” Almond said. The Visitor Center complements historic resources already in place at Chase Farm like the Hot Potato School and will provide visitors with information on the farm and meeting space as well as access to modern restroom facilities when they stop in at the farm’s events, or just access its trails and open space, according to Almond.
The success of the project will be celebrated on July 22, he noted. “We have scheduled a ribbon cutting for the Visitor Center on that day,” he said. The Summer Celebration will also be opportunity to see all the other historical assets at Chase Farm like the Hot Potato School, according to Almond. Moving the small wood-frame building from its former home across town was no easy task, Almond noted, but now it enhances the other historic buildings and programs available at Chase Farm in the past.
The volunteers restoring the interior of the school have secured period furnishings to show what a one-room school looked liked, and there is even a pot-bellied stove like the one Estelle Collier, a teacher at the old Pullen Corner school had used to cook potatoes for her hungry students all those years ago.
The Visitor Center itself will only be open during special events like the Memorial post parade gathering and the summer concert series already underway at Chase. The bathroom facilities installed in the new building will be available to Chase visitors during the park’s operating hours from morning to dusk, and a sheltered porch area with seating will also be open to those wishing to look out on Chase Farms’ rolling fields as alternative to setting out on its defined and cleared walking and running paths.
During the Summer Celebration on July 22 beginning at 11 a.m., children’s activities will include a fish derby and hayrides.
There will be American Revolutionary War and Civil War reenactors walking the grounds and talking with visitors and also presentations by the organizations and their volunteers who maintain and operate the farm’s historic buildings.
The day will conclude with a concert at 4 p.m. by the band Next Stop.
The concert series at Chase will continue with three more concert dates:
Saturday, July 28, at 6 p.m. – Grow Your Own Band
Saturday Aug. 18, at 6 p.m. – Reginald Centracchio
Saturday Aug. 25, at 6 p.m. – John Badessa Band.
Food trucks will be on hand at all four remaining events in the five-concert series.
The activities scheduled for July 22 will include an exhibit on lime mining and production in the Great Road area during the town’s early days by the Blackstone Valley Historical Society, exhibits by Historical New England, and face painting offered by Saylesville Quakers. Also participating will be the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council, the Blackstone Valley Watershed Council, Hearthside with an information table, Angell Farms, Sunset Stables, a Revolutionary War Reenactors campsite (Tew’s Company), the Civil War Reenactors (Battery B), World War I re-enactors, area fire truck apparatus, Touch a Truck, and the YMCA.
Local Girls Scout troops will be handling soap carving, s’mores, and an obstacle course, and the Cumberland & Lincoln Boys and Girls Club a fishing setup. Butterfly Farms will be running the hay rides, and Sunset Stables the pony rides. Also on tap are blacksmith demonstrations, Moffet Mill tours, Friends Meetinghouse tours, Hearthside photography, and square dancing.
The food trucks will be on hand throughout the day, and refreshments also available.
For more information visit https://www.hearthsidehouse.org/summer-event.