(HOST) Even though her local grange no longer exists, Commentator Deborah Luskin explains how the old grange hall is again at the center of village life.
(LUSKIN) At the turn of the nineteenth century, Williamsville was the hub of local industry. It was also a farming community. In living memory, there was a school, two stores, two churches, and an active Grange, which built a hall in 1910. Right through mid-century, members met there the second and fourth Fridays "to promote… a better community life." The Grange achieved this with bi-monthly lectures, suppers, dances and amateur theatricals.
When I moved to the village at the end of the twentieth century, there was still a general store that sold gas, a church that held services, and a one-room post office inside a private home.
When the store owner couldn’t afford to upgrade the underground gas tank, he pulled it. Then he sold the store. For a while, the new owner ran a really good deli – a place people from away came to buy lunch – and where locals would gather. The store has been shuttered for years now, forcing us locals to loiter outside the post office to conduct the important business of sharing news. And even though the PO has been housed in the same building for the past fifty years, it’s no longer a private residence, but a regulation outpost, with standard issue décor. With too few parishioners to support it, the Little Brown Church closed and the building recently sold.
There was a time when Williamsville was a destination, with stops for both the stagecoach and the train. Now, Williamsville is mostly a bedroom community. With both the traditional commercial and spiritual buildings out of business, the former grange hall is turning into a place where people can gather informally (the way they 
used to at the store) or with a degree of pomp and ritual (as they once did at the church). There are plans afoot to make this simple building a place for villagers to gather: to drink coffee, access wi-fi, play ping-pong, watch movies, learn crafts, sing. The possibilities are nearly endless, and the social capital huge.
When Grange 389 dwindled to a close in the 1960’s, members blamed it on TV. Since then, we’ve isolated ourselves further by plugging into our private soundtracks, watching movies on our laptops and talking on our cell phones to people somewhere else. Between these technologies and our willingness to drive everywhere, it’s no wonder our sense of the local has been jeopardized – and our sense of place in the world threatened.
The Williamsville Grange was a chapter of a national organization whose goal was to promote "better community life" in rural America. For over fifty years, Grange 389 did just that. And even though the Williamsville Grange is defunct, the Williamsville Hall lives on. Owned by the Town of Newfane and maintained by volunteers, the old grange hall has found new life fulfilling its original mission of improving the social life of a rural community.