Tour a 170-Year-Old-Church That’s Now an Art-Filled Curator’s Home

Like countless renovators before her, Donna McNeil bought her Rockland, Maine, home with decidedly lofty plans. As the founding executive director of Rockland’s Ellis-Beauregard Foundation (a nonprofit that spearheads arts education and supports creators) and lifelong curator and arts advocate, her vision encompassed much more than her own day-to-day needs. “I [bought] this place to share it; I like to host people,” she says. “I don’t have a family or partner, and so I create one through community. There’s been so much partying and dancing in this space, and it [now] functions exactly as I envisioned in terms of welcoming folks in.”

Getting to that point involved both polishing up the massive (and now-171-year-old) former church’s beautiful bones and revisiting its previous caretakers’ decisions. Join us for an intimate look at how she has spent the last seven years honoring its origins, giving it a cost-conscious makeover and creating a public-facing private home that’s even greater than the sum of its parts.

“This church was built in 1852 [for the Second Baptists] by a man named General Hiram Berry, who sadly lost his life in the American Civil War,” Donna explains. Berry served in Maine’s state legislature and as Rockland’s mayor; he was also a carpenter and a builder, and the edifice he raised at the corner of Cedar and Brewster reflects his expertise and connections.

As depicted here, the church has not a single nail. “It’s pegged together and the beams are hewn,” Donna says. “It’s remained over all these years pretty plumb, which says a lot to the quality of building in [this] area. Furthermore, Rockland’s famous for shipbuilding, and I think some of those shipwrights came and worked on this house. It’s incredibly well built.”

Sadly, the church’s original clock tower, steeple and large Gothic window are now long gone — and so was much of its most recent coats of exterior paint. “The outside of the church was so in need of a paint job that I thought I just might polish the aluminum siding and have it turned into a big tin can,” Donna recalls. “I mean it was really down to the metal, pretty much!”

Donna made the then-unusual decision to repaint the church black. “That was seven years ago [and] black houses have become more in fashion [lately],” she notes. Furthermore, “black churches are traditional in Iceland, so I wasn’t that weird. But the neighborhood …” she laughs.

She didn’t mind causing a bit of a stir. “It makes [the building] less dominant in the neighborhood,” she says. “I think that it quiets it down. If I had made it another color, or even white, it would [look] even larger. I think it works, and I love the way that the black works with green.”