OXFORD – The front doors are wide open at the 1829 Center Meeting House on Route 26, where tours are being given through Aug. 13.

Monday marked the first time the building has been open for public perusal since the town received a $10,000 grant in 2000 to help restore it. A stipulation of the award is that the building be open 12 days a year for tours.

There was no line to get in. Volunteer tour guides Margaret Ellsworth and Leona Record sat outside in their lawn chairs, enjoying pleasant weather and conversation.

“Only two or three people signed the book,” Ellsworth said, speaking of the guest book at the front of the building and the scant number of visitors who had stopped by.

Ellsworth said the meetinghouse had been used as a town hall from the time it was built until 2000, when a hot town meeting issue drew a large crowd, and town leaders saw the need for more meeting space.

“The firemen wanted a firetruck or something,” she recalled. “There was standing room only.”

Shortly thereafter, the Maine Historic Preservation Commission awarded Oxford the $10,000 for improvements to the hall, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Amy Cole Ives, an architectural historian on the preservation commission, said Oxford was fortunate to receive the money. Today, state funds for such projects are extremely hard to come by. In fact, the program through which Oxford was granted the money still exists, but is not funded to the level where money can be given out, Ives said.

“We sure wish we had more of this money because there are a lot of historic properties throughout the state that could use some,” she said.

Roxanne Eflin, executive director of Maine Preservation, a nonprofit organization that works to preserve architectural heritage, historic places and communities in the state, said meeting houses are being lost everywhere.

“They’re really a building that has helped to glue the community together, and they’re going,” Eflin said. Her organization this year has issued a bulletin declaring the town meeting hall an “endangered building type.”

Oxford’s preservation efforts are a good example of what can and should be done elsewhere, she said.

At the meeting hall, Ellsworth pointed out original woodwork and rolled glass windows that have been preserved through the town’s restoration efforts.

And, she said, the grant money helped shore up the structure’s foundation.

Ellsworth said the meetinghouse hasn’t been open since the restoration work began.

Now through Aug. 13, however, free tours will be given from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day.