The historic Mallett Hall, the Pownal Town Hall and, if the community supports it, the future site of the Pownal Community Center, Photo contributed by the Pownal Scenic and Historical Society
POWNAL — If you find a bean in your cake in Pownal, beware. You may wind up shaping the future of that small town.
Town officials are drawing inspiration from the past with an inaugural Twelfth Night celebration on Monday. Twelfth Night is a holiday celebrating the end of the 12 days of Christmas (usually mandating that decorations be taken down by the end of the night) and is the last hurrah of the holiday season.
In Pownal, it is also “an opportunity for the town’s folks to come to Mallett Hall and meet the select board and many other members of the different committees and boards that make up the volunteer’s who do the work of running the Town of Pownal,” according to Jon Morris, select board chairman.
Morris, whose family has celebrated the holiday for years, plans to make a traditional Twelfth Night cake, with a single bean cooked inside. Whoever gets the piece with the bean becomes the “Lord or Lady of Misrule for the night,” according to the town website; “An honor that beckons you to consider serving on a town committee.”
The town’s 12 committees are only operating at about half of what they should be, Morris said Friday, with only two to five members per committee.
“And it’s the same people over and over again who volunteer for the jobs,” he said. “There are so many young people in town who just don’t know” that the town needs help, he added. “We have a hard time engaging people in any way … (But) to live in almost like a utopia and not want to be a part of that is mind blowing to me,” he said.
Morris has been on the select board 11 years and said he and others are “always begging people to run” for the three-person select board. Last year, the town governing body changed its name from the board of selectmen to the select board in an effort to be more inclusive and draw more women to the role.
This struggle is not unique to Pownal. Last month, Brunswick town councilors doubled council compensation in an effort to draw more people and more diverse members to the nine-member council, which, with the departure of councilor Jane Millett, only has one female member. Only two people ran for Millett’s seat and incumbent councilors David Watson and Stephen Walker ran unopposed for their seats.
“Have we become so cynical that nobody feels like they can make an impact?” Morris asked.
He hopes the face to face conversations will help drum up interest in town government, but is really just an opportunity for people to come, “take a chance and have a good time,” he said.
Organizers also hope the event will get people to start envisioning historic Mallett Hall as a community center for Pownal. The town select board is currently considering plans to renovate the hall, built in 1886 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.
“It’s a totally beautiful building,” Morris said, but not a lot has been done to it “because we’ve been terrified to compromise its historic aspect.”
But the need for a central meeting place in Pownal, a small town with only about 1,500 residents, has been cited in multiple comprehensive plans, and with a little research, town officials realized the building could still be renovated without harming its integrity.
Now, as the town is redoing the plan, the desire has come up again.
“Pownal has nothing aside from a K-5 school and a gas station,” Morris said. “Why are we not acting when that’s what this little town needs?”
In years past, Edna and Lucy’s, a restaurant on Hallowell Road, filled that gap. It was a popular meeting spot and was “totally what Pownal needed,” Morris said.
When the restaurant closed at the end of 2017 there was “a great sense of mourning for certain people” and there has not been anything since.
“We should do something about it rather than complain about it,” Morris said, adding that he expects the community center issue will be a 2020 warrant article at the June annual town meeting.
Mallett Hall, the former Grange Hall, which is already being used as the town hall and the historical society, seemed like the perfect fit. It has plenty of space, character and history (it used to boast a two-story outhouse) and with some work, can be used as a central gathering place for younger and older people alike, perhaps with community meals, games or movie nights.
The building also has a stage, which Morris hopes next year will be home to a theater troupe performing William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” Sign up sheets will be available Monday.
Monday night’s Twelfth Night celebration runs 4-8 p.m. at Mallett Hall, 429 Hallowell Road, Route 9, in Pownal Center.
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