By Nicholas Brown
Staff Writer

It may be mere months before the 145-year-old Epsom Historic Meetinghouse is demolished in favor of a gas station and convenience store, according to representatives of a group fundraising to save the building.

Cumberland Farms, which is proposing a six-pump gas station on the Route 4 and Blackhall Road site, has given the group until Oct. 1 to raise the necessary funds to move the building, according to Friends of Epsom’s Historic Meetinghouse Committee Chairman Richard Frambach.

The meetinghouse, built in 1861, was most recently the home of the Epsom Bible Church and Christian Cornerstone Academy.

The towering white structure, first conceived by William Goss, the namesake of Gossville, is eligible for both the state and national registers of historic places.

The meetinghouse committee has raised $27,000 toward the estimated $80,000 to $90,000 required to move the building east on Route 4 to the site of the new town library.

“We really need a response from the public,” Frambach said. “The time is now. We can’t wait any longer.”

The meetinghouse committee was formed last August after representatives from the Epsom Bible Church announced Cumberland Farms’ interest in the site in May 2005.

Cumberland Farms, which has already secured two variances from the town’s zoning board and has recently been reviewing its plan with the planning board, offered to chip in $10,000 toward preserving the historic building.

Frambach said a number of local volunteers and organization have offered labor and discount supplies for a plan to refashion the building if it’s moved to the new site.

For example, a local construction company has said it would donate $10,000 worth of site work, and one anonymous donor has agreed to establish a $50,000 trust fund for future building maintenance. TD Banknorth, where a meetinghouse fund is established, also agreed to chip in $2,000 to the project.

Still, said Frambach, time to actually move the building and prevent its destruction is rapidly fading.

“Either we get it off the site or they come in there with a bulldozer and ship it off to a dump or a landfill somewhere,” said Frambach.

“There goes 140 years of history and a piece of New England lost to urban sprawl,” he said.

The meetinghouse committee has devised a plan for the old building to use it as town offices. Representatives of the group have been disseminating fliers suggesting how much money could be saved by refashioning the building for town use.

Currently taxpayers support about $22,000 in rent annually for the town office space off Blackhall Road. The current rental agreement expires in 2011.

According to the meetinghouse committee, which priced three scenarios through 2018, renovating the building for town hall use would be about $87,000 cheaper than continuing to rent, and about $537,000 cheaper than repaying a bond to construct a new town office structure.

“You’d be getting a $200,000 building for nothing,” said committee member Harvey Harkness. “The cost savings are incredible.”

Frambach noted that the numbers used by the committee are largely “speculative.”

“They’re probably in the ballpark,” he said.

For more information about the meetinghouse project, or to find out how to donate, call 736-9295 or 736-4571. All donations will be refunded if the committee falls short of its goal.