Last stand for Wellesley landmark

Wellesley Historical Commission members Linda Buffum (left) and Deborah Bates visit the building that Town Meeting is being asked to preserve. (Mark Wilson/Globe Staff)

The clock is ticking on a Wellesley landmark - one known as the town's birthplace.

The original Wellesley Country Club building is slated for demolition this fall unless the town's Historical Commission can persuade Town Meeting members next week that it is worth saving.

The private country club announced three years ago that it would demolish the building in order to build a new facility. Since then, various groups have tried to save the structure, which hugs the curb along Wellesley Avenue near Babson College. But another town landmark - the Wellesley Inn - was demolished despite similar efforts to save it, and the attempt to save the clubhouse appeared to have failed until last fall. That's when the Historical Commission tried a new approach.

The commission wants the town to help fund an effort to save "selected historic elements" of the building and reassemble them on another site, perhaps as part of another town building. Its proposal is on the warrant for Town Meeting, which opens at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Wellesley Middle School.

Parts of the building date to the 1740s, said Deborah Bates, one of the commission's seven members.

"There are handhewn beams and joists that predate the Revolutionary War," said Bates, speaking to a recent meeting of the Board of Selectmen. The second-floor ballroom was the site of a historic vote in 1880, when citizens of West Needham, as the area was then known, decided to break away and form a new town.

"This was the birthplace of Wellesley," said Bates, noting that the building served as its first Town Hall, from 1881 to 1886. The town sold the property to the Wellesley Country Club in 1920.

Bates said the structure is the "oldest public building of its size still standing in town and one of five or six in all of New England. And we, of the Historical Commission, know this to be the largest preservation project of its kind in Wellesley."

Selectman Greg Mills reported to his colleagues on March 3 that the town's Board of Public Works had investigated incorporating parts of the original clubhouse into a new administration building for the Department of Public Works. Mills said an architect working with the board "believes the idea would actually save money," and that the DPW will consider the idea.

The plan also has garnered the support of the town's Community Preservation Committee, which recommends how the town should spend funds gathered through a property-tax surcharge for local open space, affordable housing and historical preservation efforts. Bates told selectmen that the committee supports paying for an architectural inventory of the old clubhouse to establish which parts should be saved.

Estimates suggest the cost of disassembling the historic elements of the building and storing them until they can be used is about $300,000, said Mills. About $100,000 of that would come from private fund-raising and $200,000 from the preservation board's coffers.

The private funds, said Mills, would probably need to be raised by the end of June in order to hire a contractor and begin the process by the end of summer.

The Historical Commission initially sought, unsuccessfully, to persuade the country club's members to vote against the plan to demolish the landmark, and in 2005 many people considered the effort to save the building lost.

Local historian Beth Hinchliffe, author of "This Splendid Acreage of Precious Space," recounting the Wellesley Country Club's history, said the building is the town's most historic structure.