OTISFIELD — The 102nd consecutive summer service will be held at the 1839 meetinghouse on top of Bell Hill in Otisfield on Sunday, July 26, in order to celebrate God, country and traditions held dear. This year’s program will begin at 2:30 p.m. It is titled “What We Wore: Fashion and History, 1839-1965.”

Written and choreographed by Polly Bartow, this delightful and informative program will feature models from the third Maine as well as several girls from Camp Arcadia. The camp will celebrate 100 years this summer. Most of the outfits worn will be vintage garments, some brought down from Otisfield attics, with a few faithful reproductions. The clothing ranges from 1860s bloomers to a 1960s mod miniskirt ensemble. As the models parade up and down the aisles, Polly will explain why they wore what they did, and what was going on in Otisfield at the time.

The program will also feature special music by jazz pianist Dale Churchill and soprano Chris Reid. At the start of the service, Jim Washburn will ring the old bell, and Ken Bartow will follow with the invocation.

Following the service, an ice cream social will take place on the common outside. And next door, in the 1839 schoolhouse, Ann Johnstone has set up a large display of old photos, many from Historical Society archives, showing Otisfielders and a few other individuals dressed in the same styles featured in the day’s fashion parade.

This summer, the Meetinghouse on top of the Hill has been a busy place, filled on several occasions with guests attending weddings and concerts, including one by the Tricky Britches on July 8, which found saw nearly every pew occupied.

During the spring, however, it was filled with carpenters and plasterers attending to the much-needed and long-delayed reconstruction of the lofty ceiling of the building. After Otisfield contractor Mark Grover removed the deteriorating fiberboard ceiling installed as a “temporary” measure about 1950, Peter Lord and his plastering crew from Limington were able to replaster the ceiling, using over 500 gallons of water in the process. The complicated work required heating the large space while applying three consecutive coats of plaster, each of which had to dry completely before the next was applied. The ceiling restoration was funded by an extraordinary anonymous gift, and the results are dazzling.

The Meetinghouse was completed in 1839 as the second building on the site. Master builder was Nathan Nutting, Jr., a local architect who had absorbed some of the latest architectural ideas during several years in Boston. The Meetinghouse served as the First Congregational Church of Otisfield until about 1880, a few years after church members constructed a smaller but more convenient building in the Spurrs Corner section of town. That meant that the 1839 building was essentially abandoned. Somehow its neighbors and other concerned townspeople managed to do essential upkeep, financed through public suppers and “entertainments.” The tradition of an annual summer service in the Meetinghouse began in 1913, thus starting the 103-year old run. In 1927 George and Lura Turner spearheaded the formation of the Bell Hill Meetinghouse Association, which now owns and preserves both the Meetinghouse and the adjacent brick schoolhouse. Both buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

On Sunday, Aug. 9, the last event of the summer will take place on top of Bell Hill, when the Squid Jiggers, led by Dave Rowe, will perform a concert starting at 7 p.m., and thunderous music will once again fill to the ceiling with robust vocal harmonies and tunes produced by pulsing guitar, bass, bodhran, and tin whistles. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for this free concert, and admission is by donation.