NORWAY — The Board of Selectmen voted 3-0 last week to accept a plot from the estate of John Longley and name the property “Longley Square.”

Town Manager David Holt said that in the mid 2000s the town created a downtown plan and “decided it’d be nice to have a town square.”

After the town received federal funding for the project, Holt said he reached out to resident John Longley, who passed away in January 2016, about renting a parking lot he owned at the corner of Main and Deering streets.

“John, being a public-spirited person, let us rent the parking lot from him and build a town square on his property,” Holt said. “The only expense to the town was that John’s taxes were forgiven on that piece of property. We covered it under the town’s blanket insurance.”

After Longley passed away, Holt said he expressed a desire to pass the property on to the town.

“This is a tremendous gift from the Longley family,” Holt told the board, adding that in recognition of Longley’s generosity, he was recommending that the town square be renamed “Longley Square.”

“We’ll likely hold a ceremony at the square with a member of the Longley family sometime in the near future,” Holt said. “We had hoped to do this while John was still with us, but it just didn’t happen.”

Board Chairman Russell Newcomb said the Longley family “has been a fixture on Main Street for a number of years, and I think it’d be a great thing to dedicate the town square to them.”

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