The beams alone—massive timbers hewn from old-growth American chestnuts that have all but disappeared from the Grafton-area landscape—were worth a fortune, but no one would dream of selling them. Over the course of a century, prayerful Graftonites had hallowed the wood—swelling it with baptismal holy water, inundating it with the molten-golden notes of matrimony, burnishing it with anointing oil, and bowing it down with the somber weight of a thousand caskets. If people driving through Grafton on Route 4 notice the town at all, it is because of this surviving nod to cozy Yankee traditionalism,
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