LEBANON — In preparation for the Rotary Club of Lebanon’s 100th anniversary this year, club members formed a committee and began discussing how to celebrate.

They agreed that they wanted to do something for Lebanon and started brainstorming ideas.

“We looked at standard playgrounds, we looked at splash pads, plantings around the city,” said David Crandall, president-elect of the nonprofit organization.

They looked at what it would take to renovate the bandstand at Colburn Park and at projects in West Lebanon.

“We really would have loved to have Westboro Yard ready for a bandshell and see if we could get people to rally around something like that,” said Bruce Pacht, who has been a member of the Rotary Club of Lebanon since 1976.

Then, they took a trip up to a Harmony Park in Randolph.

“It looked durable and doable for us,” Pacht said.

Harmony Park – which features seven over-sized musical instruments – will bring music to a quieter part of the pedestrian mall in downtown Lebanon. The club raised the roughly $50,000 to purchase and install the instruments before giving the park to the City of Lebanon. A dedication ceremony will take place from noon to 3 p.m., May 13, at 45 Hanover St.

“Music’s been a big part of Lebanon Rotary, and we thought this was a really good gift,” said Crandall. “We wanted to give something back to the community.”

The Rotary Club of Lebanon worked with the Lebanon Recreation, Arts, & Parks Department throughout the entire process, from the brainstorming stage through the construction of Harmony Park.

“It wasn’t like they just gave the city the check … they really invested in it to make sure it was going to be a park that would be good for everybody in Lebanon,” Paul Coats, the department’s director, said.

The seven instruments — which include xylophone-like objects and other metal forms that people use to create sounds — occupy roughly 500 square feet of open space at the end of the mall near Lebanon Village Pizza and the staircase that leads down to the Lebanon Tunnel, which reopened in 2021 after extensive renovations.

“It’s meant to help infill that to some degree while also keeping the mall open for public events,” Coats said.

Pacht emphasized that while people can create tunes using the instruments, listeners shouldn’t expect to hear works by Mozart or Beethoven.

“The only kind of tunes you might be able to play is ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ or simple things like that,” he said. “You can do a lot of rhythms and make two sounds at once.”

The Rotary Club of Lebanon and recreation department envision Harmony Park as a spot people can stop at while they’re visiting a nearby restaurant or heading to an event downtown.

“Being the fact that the mall is so accessible, it’s going to be widely available to anybody, hopefully any time of year,” Coats said. “The other great thing (is) that it’s going hopefully to be an attraction to someone to want to spend more time in the mall whether getting some food or visiting the Greenway and the tunnel, doing other things in the area.”

Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.

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