A History of the
Old Town Hall

The Old Town Hall was built in 1879–1880 on the site of an earlier stone schoolhouse, raised as a joint venture between the Township of Bastard & South Burgess and Harmony Lodge No. 370, the local Masonic Lodge — one building for two purposes, designed from the outset to serve both the secular and the fraternal life of the village.

From the day it opened, the Masonic Lodge occupied the second floor, while the ground floor served as the municipal offices, the court offices, and the courthouse. A small jail occupied the basement.

The bricks were made locally by Jasper Russell, whose brickyard stood behind today's post office. Russell charged four cents per thousand bricks. The clay was mixed by a horse walking in circles, attached to a pole that drove projections through the clay bed; it was then pressed into wooden moulds by hand and stacked on their side to dry.

The original structure was a symmetrical rectangular brick building, reflecting the architectural ideals of the late nineteenth century — restrained, vertical, and unornamented save for a simple cornice and the dressed stone of its sills and lintels. Its proportions, even now, can be read on the standing façade.

In the early years of the twentieth century, a brick side addition was constructed to house expanded municipal offices, and a secure vault was added inside the building to protect the township's growing collection of land records, council minutes, and assessment rolls.

During the 1960s — by which time the hall served as much for community gatherings as for the business of the township — kitchen and washroom facilities were introduced, allowing the building to continue hosting suppers, dances, weddings, and the routine social life of the village.

Despite these changes, the building retained its historic character, and remained central to village life for generations. The principal walls, the roof line, and the proportions of the front elevation are all original; one may stand in the doorway today and look out upon a street much as it appeared in the year the hall was raised.

Near the front and side doors of the Old Town Hall, careful visitors can still find cat paw prints impressed into the original bricks. When the bricks were stacked on their side to dry at Jasper Russell's yard in 1879, a cat walked across them, leaving permanent marks that are still visible today.

The bricks were made at Jasper Russell's brickyard, located behind today's post office. Russell charged four cents per thousand bricks. Clay was mixed by a horse walking in circles, then pressed by hand into wooden moulds and stacked on their side to dry. At least one cat walked across the drying bricks — and the prints remain.

In 1979, the municipality and the Masonic Lodge vacated the building. For a century, the hall had been continuously occupied by one or both of its founding tenants. The building was then used for a time by the Delta Lion's Club.

In 1994, the Delta Mill Society purchased the Old Town Hall and repurposed it to house a portion of the Society's artefact collection and to provide an office. From 1999 to 2011, the Society used the main hall as a museum, exhibiting artefacts and photographs from the Old Stone Mill's history while the mill itself was being restored.

In 2012, major restoration efforts returned the hall to its historic appearance while improving accessibility and community use — a careful balance of conservation and adaptation, in keeping with the building's century-and-a-half-long habit of accommodating new purposes within an unchanged frame.

Today, the Old Town Hall continues to host gatherings, performances, celebrations, exhibitions, and events — carrying forward more than a century of shared community memory under the same roof, and beside the same brickwork, with which it began.