After years of fundraising, grant-writing and finger-crossing, the city of Dayville can look forward to having a fully restored community hall by next spring.

“My goal is the first of April,” said Gary Edwards of Kirby Nagelhout Construction, the Bend-based general contractor heading up the restoration work.

With a barrel vault design that makes it look a bit like a round-shouldered barn, the community hall has held a place of pride in the heart of Dayville since 1920, when it was built with money and labor donated by local people. A small addition with a kitchen and bathrooms was built in the 1950s.

The first gathering held in the Dayville Community Hall was the Armistice Day Dance of 1920, an annual event that continued for decades. Over the years the building played host to many other dances as well as wedding receptions and memorial services, high school plays and dance recitals, potluck dinners and community meetings.

It was temporarily converted into a box factory during World War II and has also done service as a movie theater (silent pictures with piano accompaniment at first, later replaced by talkies), roller rink and gymnasium. In the early days, kerosene lamps were used to illuminate basketball games, which were occasionally interrupted by fires that broke out when a ball knocked over a lamp (the spectators had to be ready to douse the flames).

But all those years of hard use took a toll on the 4,500-square-foot building, which marked its 100th birthday last year. A 1999 architectural assessment concluded that the main hall was in decent shape but needed a great deal of work to bring it up to modern standards, including insulation, new heating and electrical systems, and a new roof. The assessment recommended tearing down and replacing the 1950s addition.

A heavy lift

The price tag was steep: An updated assessment in 2009 estimated the cost at $842,000, a figure that has since ballooned to more than $2 million.

Locals have been trying for decades to raise the money needed to complete the work, but it was a heavy lift for a community with fewer than 150 residents. Still, they persisted, and their efforts paid off.

In 2019, a $1.5 million federal grant brought a great deal of momentum to the project. The Bank of Eastern Oregon kicked in $10,000, and the city of Dayville pulled together $100,000 through years of fundraising and community donations.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development Program has been a major supporter, contributing a total of $642,000, including a pair of grants totaling $170,000 that were announced on Nov. 19.

It was those two grants that finally put the funding for the project over the top, said Ruthie Moore, Dayville’s semiretired city recorder and a longtime advocate for restoring the community hall.

“We’re going with what we’ve got,” Moore said.

Hive of activity

On the day before Thanksgiving, the old community hall was buzzing with activity.

An excavator moved dirt for a new parking lot out back while a backhoe filled trenches where new utility lines had been installed. Elsewhere on the job site, workers installed new roofing panels and exterior siding. In the main hall, building materials were piled high as they awaited their turn to be used.

Edwards and his crew have been working at the site since June. They tore down the old addition and rebuilt the structure to current codes. When it’s finished, it will house a commercial-grade kitchen and fully accessible restrooms as well as a community meeting room.

Work on the main hall includes shoring up the roof trusses, putting on a new roof, installing new electrical wiring and blowing insulation into the walls.

Throughout the project, Edwards said, he and his team have worked to preserve as much of the original historic structure as possible.

“The thing we didn’t want to do is say, ‘Let’s just tear it down,’” he said during a tour of the building. “We wanted to keep the integrity (of the building), and we were able to do that.”

In the process, the workers have uncovered a number of artifacts testifying to the community hall’s rich history, from square nails and old coins to bottles with corks instead of caps and good-natured graffiti scrawled in the wings of the hall’s performance stage.

“They’ve found all kinds of memorabilia,” Moore said. “This building’s got so much history in it.”

In addition to Kirby Nagelhout, other contractors working on the community hall restoration include K3 Construction of Madras, Hage Electric and Construction Services of The Dalles, Alden Plumbing of Walla Walla, Central Oregon Heating & Cooling of Redmond, River Roofing of Bend and Boles Brothers Painting of Newberg.

Pinnacle Architecture in Bend did the design work on the project, including the 1999 architectural assessment and updates in 2009 and 2018.

Several line items have been crossed off the renovation budget to keep costs in check, Moore said, although some could be added back in if there’s any money left over when the main work is done.

“We’ve got a few things on our wish list, but for now that’s where they’ll stay till the project is nearing completion – then we’ll see if we can do them or not,” she said.

“The No. 1 priority is refinishing the floors in the hall itself.”

End in sight

But the most important thing, she said, is simply to restore the building to the point where it can once again function as Dayville’s community gathering place, something it hasn’t been able to do for a couple of years now.

“I think it’s been since the fall of 2019,” Moore said. “We weren’t able to use the building at all in the wintertime. We couldn’t keep it warm.”

That won’t be an issue when the renovation is complete. With any luck, Moore said, the refurbished community hall should be open in time for the town’s spring potluck.

And while work continues on that project, it’s about to begin on another one: construction of a new Dayville fire hall.

The old one had to be torn down after a fire truck backed into it in June 2020. The insurance company determined it was too badly damaged to be repaired, but the $166,000 insurance settlement wasn’t enough to pay for a new building, which was estimated to cost about $441,000.

Once again, Dayville’s grant-writing and fundraising machinery swung into action. The Ford Family Foundation awarded the city a grant of $134,884, and community members came through with just over $60,000 in monetary and in-kind donations.

Then last month, at the same time USDA Rural Development announced the final grant award for the community hall, the agency also said it was providing $79,800 toward the fire hall – which should be just enough to get that project over the finish line, according to Moore.

“I’m hoping both of those projects will be done about the same time,” she added.

“It would be ideal if we could have the grand opening for both at the same time.”