BENTON — Restoration of the 190-year-old Benton Falls Congregational Church has become a labor of love for this little community along the Sebasticook River which on Saturday hosted a harvest fair to help raise funds for the effort.

“We’ve been working so hard,” said Dawnela Sheehan, church treasurer and grant writer.

Sheehan and others scurried about in the parish hall next to the church on Falls Road where people were buying all sorts of baked goods, Christmas crafts and decorations and other sale items, the proceeds from which will help the restoration effort being done by Preservation Timber Framing, of Berwick.

Sheehan said organizers are trying to raise $300,000 for work including replacing large timbers in the bell tower and rebuilding the steeple. Nitram Excavation & General Contracting, of Benton, has offered to do the drainage work at a reduced rate, according to Sheehan.

“We’ve been working for four years,” she said. “We’ve had the steeple removed. It’s been jacked and leveled. We replaced some of the clapboards and the water table. We’ve had things repaired or replaced in-kind, because we’re trying to stay within the historical preservation guidelines. We received a Belvedere Fund grant for $20,000 to strip the roof and do some of the repairs on the roof and replace corner boards and cornice returns.”

The 40-by-40-foot church was incorporated in 1826 and was financed and built in 1828 as the Benton Falls Congregational Meeting House, and was owned by the Benton Falls Congregational Church, according to Sheehan. The church, which seats about 140, has a membership of 42 but about 80 people in the community have been helping with church suppers to raise funds for the restoration effort, she said.

Businesses donate for the church suppers, which help to pay for heating, insulation and the services of Pastor Kimberly Shrader.

“We added these spring and fall sales and harvest fest for added money for our project here,” said Dwight Gagnon, whose family has been church members about 100 years.

“We all want to see this restored,” Gagnon said during a church tour. “We really do. It’s just a beautiful old building.”

Church services are held at 8:45 a.m. Sundays and everyone is welcome, he said.

The church, closed in January and February, holds special meaning for Gagnon, whose grandparents were members for many years.

“My grandmother, Jennie Gagnon, who lived to be 100, came here in 1923 and was treasurer, and my father, David Gagnon, took over the treasurer’s job until 2011,” he said. “My other grandparents, Fred and Flora Page, moved here about 1940. My mom, Anita Gagnon, was the organist. My wife, Kay, is the pianist. We’ve had kind of a long involvement here.”

Dwight Gagnon, 64, grew up in Boston and remembers traveling to Benton Falls in the summers and at holidays, coming to a place that was just like the one in the  Thanksgiving poem “Over the River and Through the Wood,” by Lydia Marie Child.

“This is what people come to see in New England,” he said.

His father and uncle attended the Benton Falls School, in what is now the parish hall. In the 1950s, the Ladies Aid held a fair in the church yard, according to Dwight Gagnon.

“My sister was married here, my folks were married here,” he said.

In addition to serving as treasurer of the church, his father, David Gagnon also was tax collector and treasurer of the town of Benton for 23 years, retiring at age 91, he said.

Meanwhile, Barbara Warren, a Benton resident but not a church member, said the church bell is the last Revere bell cast by the Revere Foundry and Copper Mill in Canton, Massachusetts, in 1828. Warren wrote a history of the meeting house that says the 798-pound bell was placed on a schooner that sailed up the Kennebec River to Augusta-Gardiner, and then was transferred to a flat boat for its journey to Winslow and up the Sebasticook River to Benton Falls, which then was part of Clinton. It now is part of the town of Benton.

The boat was tied to a large boulder on the west side of the river just below the falls and as it was being brought ashore, the bell was dropped overboard, according to Warren. It was rescued from the river and hauled up Brimstone Hill to the church, she said.

Warren said later Saturday in an email that one of the church builders, Asher Hinds, who lived from 1792 to 1860, also negotiated the purchase of the bell and built Warren’s house around 1828 to 1830. Hinds was the patriarch of  a distinguished  family of politicians and statesmen, many of whom influenced not only the shaping of the town of Benton, but also of Maine and the nation, she said.

“These folks need all the help that they can get in order to save this important piece of Benton’s and Maine’s history,” Warren said of the church. “Although  I am not a member of the church, it is such an important historical building that I am trying to help anyway I can to save it.”

She and Sheehan said those wanting to donate to the restoration effort are being asked to send contributions to The Benton Falls Church Steeple Restoration Fund, Attn: Dawnela Sheehan, 274 Bellsqueeze Road, Benton, ME. 04901.

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