In 1906, people in and around the town of Rockingham recognized, surviving in their midst, an historical and architectural landmark. The Rockingham Meeting House had not been used for regular church services since 1839, nor for town meetings since 1869. Its interior had been subjected to vandalism, but it was still structurally quite intact. The town voted to appropriate $500 to restore the building, and $700 more was raised from private donations. The pulpit was rebuilt from California redwood. Dowels in the “pig pen” pews were re-created. Paint and plaster were restored. In August 1907, a grand Pilgrimage took place. People with Rockingham roots from all over came to hear a sermon and a lecture, sing hymns, eat a picnic lunch, and celebrate their town and its Meeting House.
The Pilgrimage established itself as an annual event, as it still is. In 1911, nine “interested citizens” of Rockingham and vicinity assembled at the Hotel Windham in Bellows Falls and incorporated the Old Rockingham Meeting House Association, In order to preserve the Old Rockingham Meeting House and other buildings or monuments of marked historical interest in Rockingham and the neighboring towns, and for the purpose of commemorating important historical events in the settlement and growth of Rockingham and adjacent territory; for providing an Annual Pilgrimage to the Old Rockingham Meeting House, and for further purpose of encouraging love for the civic, social, and religious principles and institutions incorporated in our local, state, and national government.
The Association has continued to exist ever since, while the word “Old” dropped from its name along the line. It has raised funds and advocated for the ongoing preservation of the building, activities which rise to critical importance as new needs are recognized well over a century after its founding. The Pilgrimage continues to be a regular responsibility. It takes place, as it has almost since the beginning, on the first Sunday of August, the cornerstone event of what has long been called Rockingham Old Home Days. (Saturday evening’s fireworks display, to be sure, attracts a bigger crowd, and the days when the Meeting House could or would accommodate several hundred people for the Pilgrimage are long past.) The format has changed some. Early Pilgrimages featured both a religious sermon and a historical or lightly political lecture, sometimes breaking for lunch in between. Hymns were sung, accompanied by the Estey reed organ which was installed in the Meeting House early in the twentieth century and which still is heard, at least briefly, at Pilgrimages. “America” and “Faith of Our Fathers” were traditional until quite recently. Prominent voices from around the country were heard from the pulpit. In 1939, Vermont Governor George Aiken gave an address on “Builders of Vermont.” In 1981, Governor Aiken, retired after decades in the United States Senate, returned to the Meeting House pulpit, and only at the end of his talk did he reveal that he had pulled from the files the very text he had used in 1939.
In 2023, a number of people from the community gathered to re-energize the Association as an ambitious program was developed by the Town of Rockingham to assure the building’s future. The technical features of this preservation vastly exceed what the people in 1906-7 had to do. The objectives are the same. The Rockingham Meeting House is a treasured national landmark, and the Rockingham Meeting House Association intends for it to stay here.