Standish residents might know the Old Red Church as the place their children visit on field trips to see its preserved schoolhouse classroom from the 19th century, a time capsule of the days of dunce caps and chalk slates. Maybe they have filed into its storied pews for a wedding or play, browsed its museum of artifacts, or know it for the popular Holiday Craft Fair it organizes annually at Bonny Eagle High School.

What they likely don’t know is that the 222-year-old landmark is in dire need of hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs, with no clear path toward securing the money.

Because the church is owned by the town, it didn’t qualify for a state grant that would have covered much of the renovations in three rounds, which trustee Claudia White, the church’s grant administrator, said will cost approximately $800,000.

The Historic Community Buildings Grant through the Maine Historic Preservation Commission is funded by a $10 million bond Maine voters approved in November 2024. Its lengthy application process requires preliminary construction plans by a licensed architect or engineer, and proposes to cover 75% of the proven necessary costs (with a maximum of $250,000 for the first of three rounds), requiring a 25% match from the organizations it assists. The commission administrators viewed the Old Red Church’s potential match funding as public taxpayer dollars, which isn’t allowed, leading to a rejection of the application.

Despite its ownership, the town funds few of the church’s costs. The 1976 deed in which the trustees gave the church to the town stipulates that the trustees are fully responsible for its maintenance. The church’s craft fair has run since that time and now brings in approximately $13,000 per year, funding most of its upkeep over 55 years.

According to trustee Chair Eleanor Dudek, the town did not provide the church money until two years ago when it submitted a formal request to the budget committee for the first time, resulting in an $8,000 allotment. It then received $20,000 for the 2025-26 fiscal year and was recently approved $10,000 for 2026-27.

“I almost fainted when (the town) gave (the money) to us,” Dudek said.

The trustees have now put $2,500 toward hiring an attorney to help them form a nonprofit so that future revenue from the craft fair, events and private donations can be considered private. However, forming the nonprofit would not allow them them privatize their existing funds, White said.

“Because (there are) funds that we raised and put in an investment account under the arm of the town, they would still, in some people’s opinion, belong to the town,” she said.

The trustees are hoping the attorney can find a legal path to change that. White said the trustees want to apply to the next round of the same grant this fall and be able to provide the 25% match amount for the commission’s maximum of $500,000 in grant money.

The attorney declined to comment on the ongoing case.

Standish town officials, who helped the trustees with the grant application in the fall, have suggested that the town could sell the church to the trustees for $1 to make its funds distinct from public dollars. However, Dudek and White said that is not in the church’s interest because the trustees do not have the financial resources to pay insurance on the building, which the town currently covers. If the trustees form a nonprofit, the town could lease the building to them for what White estimated would be a nominal amount.

“(The town) is being cooperative and helpful,” White said. “We’re working as a team.”

Standish Planning Director Zach Mosher said he would not comment on the town’s plans for the building at this stage. He said that if the trustees form a nonprofit, they would next propose a plan for the future relationship between the church and town to the Town Council, who would decide whether to sell or keep and lease the property.

When the church hired an engineering firm as part of the grant application process in the fall, it found 26 windows needed restoration, the roof needs re-shingling, and the belfry is rotting and requires reconstruction. Dudek added that the church also needs to be repainted, and a storm recently opened a hole in the corner of the church and revealed that one of the 30-foot corner posts was rotted.

The grant and match from last fall would have covered the cost of the roof, windows and engineering firm’s assessment for $305,000 in round 1. If they had earned round 1 of the grant, the trustees would then have applied for round 2 to cover $320,000 to reconstruct the belfry.

“This kind of grant program and these amounts of grant funds are a rare opportunity, so missing this boat is pretty disappointing,” White, the grant administrator on the church’s board of trustees, said.

The church received a $10,000 grant from the privately funded Morton-Kelly Charitable Trust and used $15,000 of a $16,000 endowment from the Gertrude Hasty Fund, left for the church by a Standish resident in 1986, to replace the two front doors, which is currently in process. It also paid a specialized craftsman approximately $30,000 to replace the rotted corner post, and is now investigating another structural post for rot and assessing the structural support of the second floor. But its resources are running out.

White said another option would be to turn to highly competitive federal grants offered by the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowments for the Humanities. But writing the application for those grants alone, White said, would take 40 hours, in addition to all of the other preparatory work. The quantity of regulations that must be met for proposed progress and the amount of progress reports required once the grants are earned are also barriers.

“(A federal grant application) would be my life for the next year,” White said.

According to White, who worked for the federal government in architecture, design and construction for 30 years, the ruptures in the church’s restoration process echo the current difficulty in the U.S. at-large in attaining resources for historical preservation projects.

The trustees are patiently waiting to hear from their attorney, hoping they can find a solution before the application for round 2 of the grant opens late summer or early fall.