FOUNTAIN GREEN, Sanpete County — Six years ago when volunteers announced they wanted to restore Fountain Green's historic dance hall and theater, a lot of people thought "pipe dream."
City fathers told Gene Peckham, one of the volunteers and now chairman of the Fountain Green Heritage Committee, "If you want to knock yourselves out, if you want to go down to the building and put in time, go ahead."
Now, after a $700,000 restoration, a building that is literally the last of its kind is going to last a lot longer.
Although some of the early naysayers have apologized — one went to Peckham's house to do so — their skepticism was probably justified: The volunteers had no money and the building appeared to be headed back to dust like other dance halls around Utah built by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the early 1900s.
The roof and part of the floor had caved in. Deteriorated pieces of the building had fallen into the centers of the rooms. Parts of the building were almost knee deep in pigeon droppings.
But the old hall had something else — an exceptional history. Unlike the others, it's a combination building with a theater on one side and dance hall on the other.
For decades, the building was "the heart of the community," the Heritage Committee said in an application for reconstruction money. A dance was held every weekend, and everybody came — mom, dad and the kids. Dean Hansen, who was mayor when the restoration project was launched, remembers his parents taking him to a dance in pajamas and bare feet.
When Fountain Green sent soldiers to the world wars — or welcomed them home — the town staged a dance.
A live orchestra nearly always accompanied the dancing. In the 1920s and '30s, one of the most popular groups was the Wool City Band, named for Fountain Green's sheep industry.
The theater side was used for community and children's plays and for silent movies. A man named John Oldroyd cranked the hand-operated projector. Deniece Blackham, who died earlier this year at 92, played vaudevillian music on the piano to accompany the movies.
In the 1940s, when the church started selling off its dance halls, the one in Fountain Green hall was purchased and converted to a general store and roller-skating rink. In the 1970s, the store owner shut down his business and boarded the building. It remained vacant for 30 years.
The first person to take an interest in restoring the building was Russ Evans, who at the time owned a musical instruments store next door to the theater. In 1998, he helped persuade a couple who had inherited the hall to donate it to the city, the first step in qualifying for grant money to restore it.
The Division of State History made the first grant — $40,000 for historic and engineering studies. An engineering firm completed an application that got the building listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The firm almost completed engineering drawings for a restoration. Then the firm went broke.
That was the low point in the effort, Peckham said. A new engineering firm rejected the first firm's whole approach. "We'd spent $40,000 and had almost nothing to show for it," he said.
But the heritage committee pressed forward. During 2001 and 2002, inmates from the Gunnison prison worked full time clearing debris until funding for the prison work program ran out. On weekends, local volunteers cleared junk.
"I can't count how many truckloads we hauled out," says Peckham. Finally, workers pushed remaining debris on the dance hall side into the center of the room and had a bonfire right there.
But even with the garbage gone, reactions by potential funding organizations made many start to worry that the brick walls might always have a roof of blue sky and clouds.
The turning point came about 18 months ago when a couple of brothers in town donated a roof, a $70,000 contribution.
"Once we had a brand new roof with all the trusses in place, people started saying, 'Wow, it just might happen,' " Peckham said.
After the roof went up, major loans, grants and gifts flowed, including $65,000 from the George S. and Dolores Dore' Eccles Foundation, $180,000 from the Utah Community Impact Board and about $150,000 from the community. The Heritage Committee still needs to raise about $50,000.
One of the most memorable donations, Peckham said, was a resident in his 90s who walked up and handed him $500 out of his wallet.
"Fountain Green is a funny little town," says Peckham. "People love to give, but they want to do it quietly. If you mention their names, they get hot."
The rest of the funding has come from in-kind donations of materials and volunteer labor. About 300 volunteers have donated more than 5,000 hours.
"There was never a time when we called a work party that we didn't have 20 to 30 people, from a man in his middle 70s down to kids," Peckham said.
The dance hall side of the building is complete, and a dedication party was held over Memorial Day weekend. Features include a maple dance floor with rubber matting underneath, a stenciled border around the walls that matches original stenciling and doors just like the originals.
In the theater, workers still need to install flooring on the stage, and in the auditorium, lay replica Victorian-era carpeting in the aisles, put in chairs salvaged from demolition of a theater building at Snow College and add a sound system. The finishing touch will be a marquee on the exterior.
As the building has come back to life, "some of the older generation have come in with tears literally streaming down their faces," Peckham said.
Now the Heritage Committee's goal, as expressed in a grant application, is to "bring back the plays, the beauty pageants, the dance recitals, the movies and the concerts."
The application states the committee wants to enable Sanpete County residents to once again "rekindle old friendships, dance the night away and become interested in the arts."
"We'd like to wear this place out," Peckham told the dance hall dedication crowd. "Maybe we can restore it again in another hundred years."
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