SHUTESBURY — When they started working, the front door wouldn’t open. The Victorian-era parsonage at the Shutesbury Community Church was worn and its central beam was buckling, distorting the floor and blocking the door.
The work was daunting for a 30-person congregation with limited resources, according to pastor Joe Green. But rebuilding the parsonage was of the utmost importance to growing the church community. The rebuilt parsonage could be used to attract a pastor for the long term.
“As it is now, the parsonage is not livable. We could barely keep it from falling down as it was.” Green said. “But we want to make the church more sustainable, and restoring the house could allow a future pastor to live in it and be right in the center of the community.”
To do the renovations themselves would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment, materials and manpower. Instead, they were saved by people they’d never met.
Last October, Green’s friend, Dan Deaton, visited from North Carolina, and Green mentioned to him the idea of restoring the parsonage. Deaton made no concrete suggestions, but when he returned to North Carolina —unbeknownst to Green — he started working on a plan to help.
For several months, Deaton searched for professionals who’d be willing to make a trip up to Massachusetts and help work on the parsonage. Keith Donovan, a Sunday school teacher at Deaton’s church, found Deaton praying and crying at the altar one evening, worrying about the project. When Deaton told him what he’d been trying to do, Donovan offered to help — and luckily, so did many others.
Deaton and his team — which included electricians, army chaplains, contractors and police officers — also raised over $18,000 for resources. Early this week, they came up from North Carolina, hauling 2,400 pounds of John Deere equipment through New York City traffic to get it to Shutesbury.
Through heat waves and rain, they’ve worked through the week to transform the house. They’ve gutted it, removing electric wiring, insulation and latticing that’s stacked in an 8-foot pile in the backyard. Local companies — Cowl’s Building Supply in Amherst and TJ’s Taylor Rental in Hadley — gave discounts and resources, and members of the congregation have dropped off food and water.
Working on the house has been a constant challenge because of the antiquated features — plaster, finicky wiring, iron bolts and trusses and an old, fragile frame — said Dudley Neal, a former army chaplain working on the house.
“It’s like a puzzle we didn’t have all the pieces to, so we couldn’t see the picture,” Neal said.
Piece by piece, they’ve tugged the house into the modern age. They installed 160 feet of piping and sump pumps to drain the basement and replaced the cement stairs. They’ve moved heaps of earth and reset concrete foundation. One man used skills he learned from his grandfather, a stone mason, to build a stone entryway around the back of the house.
Members of the congregation are thrilled to see the parsonage being revitalized, said Linda Hanscom, church trustee, whose ancestors founded the church. It’s central to their history — the church secretary’s mother was even born in it.
Since the church was founded, its pastors lived in the parsonage — built in the 1880s — until it fell into disrepair.
Soon, much of the team will return to North Carolina. The Shutesbury congregation will keep working to restore it, but they don’t have a specific deadline or cost estimate for when it’ll finally be finished.
The house is still far from livable, paint peeling and musty. But now it resembles a home, Green said, enough for him and his congregation to believe they can turn it into one.
“This has been an intense week, and at times it’s been overwhelming,” Green said. “But God brought these people to us and now it feels like there is a way forward.”