People gather around a fire pit at Rupert’s winter solstice event held on the town green on Dec. 21, 2024. Photo courtesy of Nancy PolettiOn winter solstice, around 30 people gathered to enjoy hot chocolate and roasted chestnuts as they gazed out on handmade luminaries snaking along Rupert’s town green, white with snow.At dusk, the luminaries were lit.“There were a bunch of kids, and a lot of people stood around the fire and made some s’mores,” said Jed Rubin, a Rupert resident and board member of the Rupert Village Trust. “It was a good time.”It marked the fourth year of the tradition, which started during the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to bring the community together safely through outdoor programming, according to Jane Davies, director of Rupert Village Trust, a nonprofit organization focused on historic preservation and community development, which has organized events, such as the solstice celebration, on the green. In a town with a population of around 700 in the northwest corner of Bennington County, Rupert’s town green, while still in development, has helped bring the community together and attract people to the area, according to Janet Hurley, assistant director and planning program manager for the Bennington Regional Planning Commission. “It’s a very rural town, kind of out of the way from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the county,” Hurley said. “It feels really inviting and quiet and homey to visit, even in its infancy.”The town-owned green has been transformed from an underutilized field into a site for activities like sledding in the winter, cookouts and lawn games in the summer, and gatherings for holidays like Valentine’s Day and Easter, Davies said. Rupert’s residents have even created a new holiday celebration — root beer float day — where everyone gets a root beer float on the town green, she said. Photo courtesy of Nancy PolettiIn 2020, the town sold off forest land that the public was not using to a landowner and spent $25,000 of the proceeds to purchase 25 acres, 13.5 acres of which was conserved through an agreement with Vermont Land Trust for the town green, Rubin said. The town sold 2 acres that borders the nearby Sheldon General Store to the village trust for $25,000 soon after. Rubin said this was because the store’s septic system needed upgrades, and the Vermont Land Trust did not want a leach field on the conserved land. The deal left the remaining 11.5 acres still under conservation.After the necessary upgrades to the historic building’s septic system, the village trust has begun developing a cafe and community center in the general store, he said. Since the town acquired the land, a group of volunteer residents — including Davies — formed a town green committee to head a revitalization effort. The committee developed a parking lot, information kiosk, signage, and added picnic tables and accessible paths on the land, Davies said. As Rupert has an aging population, Davies said it’s important that the paths winding the green serve those with mobility concerns.The committee has much more in store for the green, including a pavilion, play structure and landscaping, said Mark Lourie, co-chair of the town green committee and Rupert’s town fire warden, who was also on the selectboard in 2020 when the land was acquired for the town green. The green has received $35,000 of funding from the state’s Municipal Technical Assistance Program, according to Hurley. Residents of Rupert have voted to put $25,000 toward funding the town green improvements annually since the project started, Rubin said. Although the town green committee has yet to recommend the exact dollar amount to sustain the project into the future, Lourie said he hopes that the public will vote in favor of more funding on the upcoming Town Meeting Day.“We are in those planning stages right now,” Lourie said. “It’s going to take a fair amount of money to get that done, and we’re going to need to go to the voters to get that money approved.”Davies said there was pushback from residents who worried about cost before the town green project started, but the green has proven to be a popular and valuable asset to the town. “Now that it’s there, I think people are more on board,” Davies said. “It’s going to be easier and easier to vote for money toward maintenance of the town green because the more features there are, the more people are going to use it.”Sam Anderson, the landscape architect for the town green project, said she’s tasked with planning gardens, creating seating areas and an accessible natural playscape for the town green while also keeping costs down.Anderson said she plans to build play structures with natural building materials and take design inspiration from nature. The project will foster community involvement and volunteerism, she said, because she is seeking reclaimed materials, such as rocks or old tractor tires, to build the play space and other features on the green.Davies said that it was crucial that the green be accessible and beneficial to all ages in Rupert, including younger people who have moved to the town in recent years. “We particularly have a number of young families who are fairly new to Rupert,” Davies said. “Those families want playground equipment and a place where parents could go sit and have lunch and keep an eye on their kids.”Along with its environmental benefits, sourcing reclaimed building materials from people in the community will foster imaginative thinking in order to craft a space that’s unique to Rupert and  can be used for “unprogrammed play” by everybody, Anderson said.“Anytime we are reusing material rather than manufacturing something brand new, the carbon footprint is going to be lower,” Anderson said. ”That, to me, is also very exciting, being able to see what we can drum up for interesting and fun building materials to create something really special for the town of Rupert and whoever else wants to visit.”The town green committee’s ambition of building a pavilion and play structure on the green and the village trust’s work rehabilitating and creating a community center and cafe in the historic general store next door “beautifully dovetail” each other’s community building goals, according to Hurley. “These are really closely related projects that are really good community development pursuits,” Hurley said. “For both of these projects, they’re nice places to just go and have a peaceful time enjoying the scenery.”Although the project has yet to be fully realized, Lourie said that the town green will foster community gathering for years to come. “Even though it’s taken longer than what we had hoped for, it’s just going to be a great space for people to enjoy and events to be held for the future,” Lourie said. Read the story on VTDigger here: Town and local nonprofit collaborate on revitalizing Rupert Village, starting with town green.