Grange Action Program

Successful Actions of Mt. Pistareen Grange - NH

“Mt. Pistareen Grange No. 145 was incorporated in 1889,” says Carol Dumont, Master. “In 1950, the Grange became caretakers of our current building which was a former one-room school. We believe that the town gave a lifetime lease to the Grange for $1.00, with the understanding that the building remains under the stewardship of Mt. Pistareen Grange only as long as the Grange remains active.”

“Mt. Pistareen Grange rented the building to the Village Children’s Center, which provided a pre-school and after school care. But by 2004, we were told that because membership was down to only six members, Mt. Pistareen Grange was in danger of losing its charter. And if that happened, the Village Children’s Center would lose its home.”

“So a group of parents who saw the need for the pre-school in our community decided to join Grange, adding 16 new members. With the help of our seasoned members, our new group is still learning about Grange,” says Carol.

“We continued with a highway clean-up project that the Grange used to do, but it got so they didn’t have enough people to do the work. Now we have the people. We currently have 24 members and hope to add two to three more by early next year.”

“We strongly believe in education, and have adopted the Grange’s Dictionary Project. We also collect food items at all our meetings for Joan’s Pantry, a local food kitchen. In fact, during a recent visit to Joan’s Pantry, we heard that we’d started a positive trend in town. Another organization heard that we collect food at all our meetings, and they started doing the same thing!”

“We meet on the last Monday evening of every month, often with a pot-luck dinner. When we eat, we get good attendance! And children are always welcome to attend with their parents,” says Carol.

“This last April, we got a great poster from State or National Grange about Grange Awareness Month, and we felt inspired to do something. So we came up with an evening when we could invite the community in to do some entertaining, feeding, and honoring,” says Karen LaRue.

“We started the evening with Magical Harmonies, a barbershop quartet who entertained us.”

“They were incredible,” adds Carol.

“Then we honored three women as Citizens of the Year. They are all involved with Joan’s Pantry and they told us about the food pantry in Chesterfield. And we uncovered some interesting history. Joan’s Pantry is named after Joan Dittrich who was a Past-Master of Mt. Pistareen Grange,” says Karen.

“We were able to tell people what we do as a Grange, and then we invited people to sample a wonderful array of chocolate desserts. Everyone who came got tickets so they could vote for their top three choices. We just asked our members to bring the goodies, and the only rule was that it needed to contain chocolate. So we had cookies, trifle, pies, all kinds of gooey, delectable stuff,” says Karen.

“It was something fun and different – an attention-getter. And it’s not something we have much around here. Within a week, we had three new members plus some others are thinking about joining! So now we say, feed them chocolate and they will come. And then once they come, show them what you’re doing. Even the barbershop quartet hung around for the rest of the evening. It really made for a wonderful night!”

“We called it the Chocolate Bake-Off Tasters’ Evening, and 50 people showed up,” adds Carol. “It was exciting!”

Karen adds, “And it was free. But it was such a success that we thought we might put out a can for donations next year.”

“Prior to becoming the Grange Hall, our building was a one-room school,” says Jim Flanders. “A man named Frazier was the schoolmaster. I have the good fortune to direct a Barbershop Society in Cheshire, a neighboring community. We have six active quartets in addition to the entire chorus. So when we thought some entertainment might be in order for our Chocolate Bake-Off and Tasters Night, we asked one of the quartets, ‘State Line’ to come sing. Everyone there certainly enjoyed it, and the singers stuck around to learn about Grange and dip their fingers into the chocolate too!”

“By nature, barbershop singing is very wholesome and fits in great with Grange. I’d encourage Granges everywhere to seek out your local barbershop societies and get them to entertain at your events,” says Jim.

“One of our community service projects is a highway clean-up,” says Pat McDerby, treasurer of Mt. Pistareen Grange. “The Grange had done this before we joined, but they weren’t able to keep it up because they didn’t have enough people. Since 2004, we’ve picked up 33 bags of litter than would otherwise have polluted our environment and distracted from the natural beauty of our environment. We have a sign at either end of our two-mile stretch that recognizes Mt. Pistareen Grange for adopting that section of the road. It’s fun! We get more people out than we need, and it takes us about an hour to pick up our two miles.”

“At the end of our June meeting, we decided to have an ice cream social as a way for us to wrap up our year before we broke for the summer,” says Beth, another Mt Pistareen Granger. “We wanted to share with everyone and get to know our prospective members. We held it outdoors, and our Lecturer had some very clever ‘get-to-know-you’ games that created some good conversation and lots of laughter.”

“At the beginning of August is the Cheshire Fair, and we were asked what we’d do for the Grange display. The theme this year was ‘Spread the Word,’ so we did an exhibit that gave people a peek at what we’ve been doing. We proudly took home a blue ribbon, as well as the Best in Show purple ribbon. The prize money supports our dictionary project.”

“At the Big E – which is the Eastern States Exposition, a 3-week fair – there’s a New Hampshire Building, and New Hampshire State Grange has a blueberry pie booth. They asked for volunteers and so a couple of us went down to help,” says Carol. “The booth is just open on opening day and one other day, and Grangers from throughout the state go down to volunteer. In just 3 days, we raised $1400! We were tired at the end of each day, but we met a lot of wonderful Grange people and had fun raising money for the State Grange.”

“This year, the New Hampshire State Grange Session was held near us. Two of us attended and received our 5 th and 6 th degrees. We really enjoyed learning more about Grange and talking with other New Hampshire Grangers. What a wonderful group of people! We were really in awe of the floor work and impeccable ritual. It was quite impressive to someone who is new to Grange.”

“We were especially proud to be there when New Hampshire State Grange elected our first woman as State Master, Beth Merrill. She’s a great person!” says Carol. “And it was so impressive when they recognized one man for being in Grange for 75 years!”

“We are in our third year of the Dictionary Project, giving dictionaries to third graders in two communities in our area” says Laura, another Mt. Pistareen Granger. “The kids are great, and they love looking at their dictionaries! We provided 50 dictionaries in Chesterfield and Westmoreland. We hope to provide them in Marlowe as well next year. Both new and seasoned Grange members enjoy giving out the dictionaries. The kids enjoy looking up the longest word – until we ask the teachers to put that word on their spelling tests! We help them find out other interesting things too – about the planets, the sign language alphabet, multiplication tables, and information about the American flag. My daughter uses hers all the time.”

“And in doing the Dictionary Project, we members learned some interesting things about Grange. We were impressed that Grange was the first organization to give women an equal vote with men, and that Grange helped establish the Rural Free Delivery program of the US Post Office. Grange was involved in setting up libraries in many communities, and in New Hampshire, Grange was active in lobbying for a State Police Force. And the Agricultural Stations established by New Hampshire State Grange evolved into what is now the University System of New Hampshire,” says Laura. “It was great for our new members to find out all the terrific things Grange has done.”

“As with many organizations, finances are always an issue,” says Jim Flanders. “Two years ago, we joined up with the Church Fair in Keene – a few miles away. Every December on the first Saturday, they hold a fair where all churches sell craft items on the same day. The Methodist Church where I’m the choir director, let us put up a table for free, and we sold home-made craft and food items and did a make-it-and-take-it craft activity for kids, and we had a very successful fundraiser. The kids from the Village Children’s Center made items too, and you know, people just love home-made things. Our little table made $600! And then the left-over items, we took and sold at the pre-school – and they all sold out too!”

“When we first joined in 2004, Doris Bruno was our Lecturer,” says Jim. “She was just full of activities that were fun and guaranteed to make us smile. My wife Kim has now become the Lecturer, and she’s carrying on the tradition with lots of getting-to-know you activities. She came up with a very clever ploy at one of our meetings. She came armed with a roll of toilet paper and passed it around. All she said was to take the number of sheets that you think you’d need. Well everyone did that, but then Kim said that for every sheet you took you had to tell everyone in the room something that they didn’t already know about you. Well some folks had only taken one or two sheets, but others had taken 7-10 sheets and it took a while to come up with that many things people didn’t know about you! But it was hard to be embarrassed of stuffy while you were holding sheets of toilet paper, and it was a fun way to get to know each other better!”

“At our October meeting, Kim made contact with our county Extension agent who did a program on gardening for us. He did an excellent program and told us about his work with farmers – crops and diseases – and also with average consumers who might have fruit trees or vegetable gardens. It was a very informative program,” says Jim.

“One thing that’s exciting, I think, is that we are a very young Grange,” says Carol. “We have 24 members right now and we range in age from 20-80ish. Some of our older members won’t tell us just how old they are! But we figure that our average age is 40ish.”

Kathy Yardley, the Deputy State Master assigned to that part of New Hampshire says, “I am so proud of the folks at Mt. Pistareen Grange and the hard work they’re doing! They’re putting a positive spin on Grange’s image in that community, and it’s really nice to see them embracing the Grange tradition.”