Then & Now: Greenville Fire Station and Copeland Library, Leicester

Depending on your interests and perhaps your lineage, the small, nicely trimmed building at River and Pleasant streets in Leicester is referred to as the Greenville Fire Station or the Copeland Memorial Library.

Of course, the abandoned building doesn't warrant many mentions these days, having been mostly idle for the last half-century.

But for those familiar with Leicester history, the building is deserving of both labels — a firehouse and a library.

It was constructed in 1884 as a fire station, in the days of horse-drawn equipment, serving the village of Greenville, notably the mill at Greenville Pond. A similar station was built in Rochdale.

About 1900, the Fire Department (dating to 1812 in Leicester) bought a horse-drawn steamer that was housed in Rochdale. The Greenville station was taken offline.

Using money left to the town years earlier by wealthy landowner Ephraim Copeland, the building was reworked into a library branch. Copeland Memorial Library opened in 1901. It was a convenient spot for Greenville residents to pick up books that were brought from the main library. Some Greenville residents used it as a reading room.

The branch closed in the late 1960s and has largely sat vacant since. It got a needed sprucing up in the 1990s, headed by the Copeland Library Preservation Committee. A $15,000 grant from the Massachusetts Historical Commission, plus funds from other preservation and historical interests, was used to repair the foundation and roof. The most visible part of the improvements, completed in 1998, was the restoration of the exterior to its original color scheme — green and red.

But in the more than two decades since the facelift, the worn look of the building has returned.

Don Lennerton, a longtime member of the Historical Commission and a firetruck history buff, said regular upkeep of the building went away when the commission's budget was cut years ago. Lennerton is hopeful that interest in preserving the building will someday yield needed maintenance — a scenario that played out nearly 30 years ago.

Last week Then & Now: The Office Lounge, 64 Madison St., Worcester

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Then & Now: Greenville Fire Station and Copeland Library, Leicester