OTISFIELD – The annual Bell Hill Meeting House service will be held at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, July 25, marking the 91st consecutive year services have been held in the historic meeting house at the top of Bell Hill.

The speaker will be the Rev. Margaret Rush Hankins of Denver, who has spend part of the several past summers on Thompson Lake. She retired last year after 25 years of service as a minister of the United Methodist Church. She is a graduate of Birmingham-Southern College, Duke Divinity School and San Francisco Theological Seminary. Her topic will be, “Do We Look Like Our Picture?”

Music will be provided by the Hills Alive Chorale, directed by Dan Allen of South Paris and accompanied by Virginia Nobel of Otisfield.

Although a woman preacher is certainly no novelty to today’s worshippers, Hankins would have been considered an aberration to members of the church in 1839, the year it was built as the second Congregational Church on the site. In 1887 the Congregationalists moved to their new church at Spurrs Corner. After that date religious services were held only sporadically in the Bell Hill Meeting House, and the maintenance of the building became a community responsibility.

The meetinghouse is now owned by the Bell Hill Meeting House Association, formed in 1927 for the purposes of preserving the building and continuing the tradition of Christian services in the church.

In 2003 the building and the brick schoolhouse adjoining it, also built in 1839 and also owned by the association, were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The public is invited to attend the nondenominational service and visit the schoolhouse. Following the service, refreshments will be served on the lawn between the two buildings.