The Mathews Lions Club held a dedication ceremony Saturday for its new building on Windsor Road.

The 50’x75’ 1½-story Heritage metal building was a long time coming. Lion Layton Merithew said it took around five years of setting up rental tents and hauling rental tables and chairs to events to raise enough money to put up the basic building. The design phase began in 2015 and the building was erected in 2016. And then the real work began.

Club members “did all the construction pretty much ourselves,” said Merithew. This included the wiring, plumbing, insulation, sheetrock and any other jobs. Only the HVAC was done outside, by local contractor Jennings Haynes. After a break because of the pandemic, the finishing touches were finally added and the building was ready for occupancy.

Merithew said there’s “significant pride in the membership in having a place of our own.”

“It expands our ability to serve the community in additional directions that we hadn’t even considered,” he...