Paul Doton has been moderator in Barnard for 30 years, and his father was moderator before him.
When he took up the gavel in the early 1990s, Doton said, Town Meeting was an event.
“At that point in time, there were in excess of 100 people who came to Town Meeting,” he said. The Progressive Club sold lunch between the town and school portions of the meeting, scholarships for students were announced, whole families would attend and people took the day off. Townspeople decided on budgets, but the meeting was a social occasion, too, something not to be missed.
“That doesn’t occur now,” Doton said.
Last year’s Barnard meeting was postponed until May and it drew around 30 people. This year’s, held last Tuesday, drew in excess of 60, not bad, but not exactly a banner day.
A form of government unique to New England, Town Meeting is an exercise in community-building. What Doton sees in Barnard is cause for concern about the health of the institution.
It used to go hand-in-hand with the character of the region, small towns quilted together by small farms. After hunkering down for winter, residents braved the weather and the roads to mix business with catching up.
“It’s just not the agricultural background that it was,” Doton said, noting that when he became moderator there were eight to 10 dairy farms in town and now there are two, the Doton Farm being one of them. People moving into Barnard are often seeking solitude, not community. The coronavirus pandemic has something to do with that.
Barnard is now part of a unified school district that votes by Australian ballot. (That’s the daylong secret balloting used for state and national elections.) So the annual meeting might seem less critical.
But the appeal of the meeting endures, in part because democracy elsewhere feels more fragile, and because there’s nothing else quite like it.
“It has not changed, but it has become, I think, I sense, more important, because people are feeling like democracy is fraying,” Kelly Green, who has moderated meetings in Randolph since 2011, said.
“A fundamental feature of Town Meeting that makes it such an excellent exercise is that it requires people attending to practice speaking and practice listening,” Green said. “It’s great. I love Town Meeting.”
Just before the pandemic, Randolph moved its Town Meeting to the Saturday before the traditional meeting day of the first Tuesday in March, in the hopes of increasing participation. The canceled in-person meetings this year and last have made it impossible to assess whether that move helped, Green said.
There’s no question that Town Meeting has changed over the years, but it’s a durable institution, Steve Taylor, who served as moderator in Plainfield for 30 years, until 2011, said.
“It certainly has changed as population has grown and more people aren’t native to the tradition,” said Taylor, who also served as New Hampshire agriculture commissioner. But new residents come to Town Meeting “and they’re sold on it,” he said.
Plainfield has for decades held its town and school meetings on separate days, but this year they’ll be held on the same day, with the school meeting at 9 on Saturday morning and the town’s at 1 p.m. (The two meetings were brought back together last year, when they were held in June, under a tent.)
To enhance the community spirit of Town Meeting Day, “there needs to be food,” Taylor said, whether a lunch put on by a community group or even just coffee and baked goods.
“I’ve always watched that dynamic with great interest,” Taylor said.
In an oral history of Plainfield, a resident named Ralph Jordan talked about attending Town Meeting in the 1890s. Attendance at the time was restricted to men, Taylor said. They spread sawdust on the floor because so many of them chewed tobacco. They ordered in raw oysters and drank whiskey.
“ ‘By noontime,’ he said, ‘it was like a room full of young bulls. Everybody would be trying to knock each other over,’ ” Taylor said.
Plainfield now averages 200 to 250 people at Town Meeting every year, Taylor said. As a percentage of the checklist, “I have to say it’s gone down,” he added.
“I’m a stout, loyal defender” of Town Meeting, he said. “It’s unequalled for allowing for robust discussion, compelling people on both sides of an issue to listen to each other and make a decision.”
It also gives ordinary people the ability to bring their creativity to bear on town governance.
“What I want people to understand is that individuals in our communities have actual authority to run town government,” Green said. If someone has an idea, they can draw it up and get it onto the meeting warning (it’s called a warrant in New Hampshire). Then, at the meeting, the issue will get discussed and, amazingly, voted up or down.
“You don’t have to wait for the town manager or the selectboard to do anything,” Green said. “You don’t have to wait for the government to take action.”
In 2012, the year after Tropical Storm Irene devastated Bethel, voters there twice prevented their Town Meeting from adjourning, because they felt their officials hadn’t heard what they were saying. It was an example of community-building amid the work of approving budgets and electing officers.
All kinds of community events have struggled during the pandemic. Every year, the Doton Farm holds a community picnic for neighbors. They invite 100 and get 60 or so. And in East Barnard, on the other end of town, the community hall has been quiet.
“People don’t feel comfortable in that social setting the way they used to,” Doton said.
When that comfort returns, maybe Town Meeting will, too.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
