The floorboards at McBaine Community Hall groan in protest every Friday at 7 p.m. It's not a complaint—more like a sigh of recognition. For nearly four years, this squat brick building on the edge of town has been filling with the scrape of leather soles, the tuning of fiddles, and the clipped, rhythmic commands of a caller who refuses to let square dancing become a museum piece.
Molly Jenkins, 34, stands on a milk crate at the front of the hall, a cordless microphone in one hand and a iced tea in the other. She started calling here in 2021, after she moved back to McBaine during the pandemic and taught do-si-dos over Zoom in her parents' barn. Now, on a typical Friday, 40 to 60 dancers pack the floor: retirees who remember when the hall hosted dances in the 1970s, college students from Columbia looking for something analog, and families with children who treat the allemande left like a playground game.
"I watched my grandparents meet at a square dance in this same hall," Jenkins says during a water break, her voice still carrying the trace of a caller's cadence. "Now I'm watching it happen for a new generation. Last month, two people met here. They came separately. They're coming together now."
The Sound of Now and Then
The music comes from the McBaine String Ramblers, a five-piece anchored by fiddler Dale Koestner, 61, and his 24-year-old niece on electric guitar. Their sets veer without warning from "Soldier's Joy" into fiddle-driven covers of Tom Petty, then into something Koestner wrote himself after a drought summer. The older dancers whoop at the familiar standards. The younger ones lean in when the guitar distorts.
This tension between preservation and adaptation isn't always comfortable. Koestner admits that some traditionalists grumbled when the band added drums two years ago. "But the floor was half-empty on those pure old-time nights," he says. "Now we're turning people away when the weather's good."
The hall itself bears the marks of compromise and care. Strings of white lights crisscross the ceiling, hung by volunteers the first Thursday of every month. Hand-painted banners from the 1980s—depicting barns, fiddles, and pairs of boots—hang alongside a newer poster advertising the hall's venison chili fundraiser. By 6:30, a long folding table of Crock-Pots and casseroles appears without fail near the kitchen. No one organizes it officially. Someone just starts plugging them in.
What It Feels Like to Start
For first-timers, the initial minutes can feel like arriving at a party where everyone already knows the handshake. Jenkins solves this by running a 15-minute beginner's session before the main dance, walking newcomers through the promenade, the sashay, and the difference between a do-si-do and an allemande left.
"I came for the music," says Lena Torres, 29, who attended her first dance in March after spotting a flyer at a Columbia coffee shop. "I stayed because a stranger in cowboy boots taught me the difference between a sashay and a do-si-do. I messed up the whole figure. He said, 'That's fine. The floor's been messed up since 1952.'"
Torres now drives 25 minutes every Friday. She is part of a quiet demographic shift that has kept the hall solvent. In 2019, the McBaine Community Hall Association was $8,000 behind on roof repairs and considering whether to sell. The Friday dance revival—bolstered by a $3,000 county arts grant and a volunteer roof-raising weekend in 2022—has put the building back in the black.
More Than the Steps
The dancing itself is rigorous enough to leave most participants sweating through their shirts by the second hour. Jenkins calls figures fast, and the floorboards—original pine, scarred by decades of use—creak audibly during the busiest sets. But the physical exertion is only part of why people return.
At 9:15, the band takes a break. Dancers cluster around the Crock-Pot table, balancing paper plates of venison chili, cornbread, and a green bean casserole that a woman named Doris has made every week for three years. Children chase each other between the folding chairs. A man in his twenties teaches an elderly woman how to use her phone's flashlight to find her car keys.
"It's not a club you join," Jenkins says. "It's a room you show up to. That's the only requirement."
An Invitation
If you find yourself near McBaine on a Friday night, the hall's screen door stands open from 6:45 until the last dancer leaves. Admission is $8, or $5 for students
