Tryworks Coffee House
From 1967 to 2002, thousands of people walked through the doors of the auditorium at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford to attend the Tryworks Coffee House.
Here were heard the skirl of the bagpipes, the strumming of guitars, the songs of whaling, blues, and myriad traditions, and the thump of feet in folk dance.
Many young people were enriched by the fellowship they found, the stories they shared, and the understanding they learned through their sharing of youth and the arts.
It truly was a magical place.
The auditorium was officially dedicated as the Tryworks Auditorium on September 12, 2004.
In Maggi's Own Words
Recorded by Rev. Dan Harper in 2009, uploaded in 2024
A 2009 talk by Maggi Kerr Peirce (1931-2024) about Tryworks Coffeehouse, a long-running coffeehouse in New Bedford, Mass. In addition to directing Tryworks for twenty years, Maggi also performed as a storyteller and folk singer at the Smithsonian, the Newport Folk Festival, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, on the old Prairie Home Companion radio show, and of course at Tryworks Coffeehouse.
The images in the video are photos I took in late 2008 of the Tryworks scrapbook Maggi had maintained. [Now at the UMass Dartmouth archives] In 2009, at about the time Maggi gave this talk, this scrapbook and other Tryworks memorabilia were deposited in the UMass Dartmouth library.
Maggi asked me to make an audio recording of her talk as another way to record the legacy of Tryworks. I later made a partial transcript of the audio file, and used that to write a chapter in my book Liberal Pilgrims, a collection of essays written for the 300th anniversary of First Unitarian Church of New Bedford.
However, her talk deserves a wider audience than a book of narrow interest that never sold more than 100 copies. Thus, after Maggi's death, I decided to post this video so her talk describing an extraordinary outreach to young people would be more widely available.