History

It was felt, in the spring of 1988, that Vesper Glen had accumulated a quantity of folding chairs disproportionate to any single building's need for them. Four congregations, two fellowship halls, and the Odd Fellows lodge had each, in the course of ordinary refurbishment, retired their seating within eighteen months of one another, and it was the Ministerial Association's Reverend Ada Timmerman who proposed, at the March meeting, that rather than dispersing the chairs to whichever basement had room, the Association might erect a shelter and seat them together. The proposal carried 6 to 1, the dissent recorded only as 'Bro. Halvorsen, on grounds of precedent.' What precedent was not specified, and the minutes do not return to the question.

The shelter itself is not large: a shallow gabled roof on four posts, twenty-two feet by eighteen (6.7 by 5.5 metres, the survey having been taken in feet and converted afterward, imperfectly, for the grant file), open on all sides, set on a poured concrete pad. The sum appears in the Association's 1988 building fund report, Schedule 2, and will not be repeated here beyond the observation that it was raised entirely through the participating congregations' own collections, no outside grant being sought or, the minutes note with what reads as some relief, offered. Each chair was bolted to the pad in the order its donating body joined the arrangement, a sequence the Association calls seniority and which has been a source of quiet feeling ever since.

The brass plaques were not part of the original proposal. They were added the following year, 1989, after it was felt — the phrase recurs throughout the Association's records to the point of house style — that a chair without attribution was merely a chair, whereas a chair with attribution was a record. Each plaque was paid for by the donating congregation, engraved off-site, and affixed by a volunteer whose name the minutes give as 'Mr. Ostrander, retired.' The engraving specifies the chair's origin only; no chair records its reason for retirement, a decision the Association reaffirmed by vote in 1990 after a proposal to add cause of retirement was withdrawn without a second.

A locked cabinet marked CHAIR RECORDS was installed beside the lectern in 1993 and is understood to contain the correspondence, condition reports, and transfer paperwork for all thirty-six chairs, along with, per the 1993 minutes, 'such further chairs as may in future be received.' The keyholder rotates annually among the participating congregations by a schedule posted inside the cabinet door, which is itself, on the point of some local amusement, visible only when the cabinet is open. The shelter has received no further chairs since 1994, a fact the Association attributes to improved maintenance practices across the participating congregations rather than to any change in policy, and records, each January, as 'no additions to report.'

Local Legends

Some residents maintain the easternmost row was realigned in 1997 after a disagreement over proper aisle width, and that the disagreement was between two members of the same family, seated on either side of the aisle in question, neither of whom has since agreed to discuss it. The Association's maintenance log for that year records only 'Row 3, re-set, per measurement.'

It is occasionally suggested that one chair — never the same chair twice, in the telling — is warmer than the others on a cold morning, a claim the Association has neither investigated nor, in thirty-odd years, been asked to formally.

Several residents report that the CHAIR RECORDS cabinet contains a thirty-seventh plaque, engraved but never affixed, for a chair that was pledged and never delivered. The current keyholder, asked, said only that the cabinet contains what the cabinet contains.

The Controversy

In 2004 a visiting insurance assessor classified the shelter as a 'place of assembly, unenclosed,' a designation the Ministerial Association's own filings had for sixteen years avoided by describing it, accurately if narrowly, as 'seating, outdoor, memorial in character.' The reclassification raised the shelter's premium by a sum the Association's treasurer described in that year's report as 'not small, though bearable across six congregations.' The Association's appeal, arguing that a shrine is not an assembly hall, was denied on the grounds that thirty-six bolted chairs constitute, whatever their intent, a fixed capacity. The premium is paid annually and without further appeal, an arrangement both sides now describe as settled.

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