In 1923, a few like-minded businessmen in Norway, Maine, began gathering around a pot belly stove in a vacant store with antique chairs, a rickety table, cedar for whittling, and a spittoon, creating the Norway Weary Club. For years they met informally on winter evenings in Beal's Tavern office for cribbage, jackknife work, smoking, and talk, until the inn closed for the winter in 1926. Fred W. Sanborn, publisher of the Norway Advertiser-Democrat, helped rent a vacant store in the old Robert Noyes block on Main Street, where the group resumed its usual routines and turned whittling into a competitive craft, with a shaving light enough to float required for membership in the circle. In 1927, after the building and land were sold to Norway National Bank, Sanborn acquired part of the cleared lot and erected the building later occupied by the club, turning it over on a nine hundred and ninety-nine year lease with restrictions. A formal organization followed, with officers and directors, the official name The Weary Club of Norway, and bylaws that banned games of chance for money, excluded liquor, prohibited telephones, and limited conversation mainly to fishing, hunting, and related subjects, while allowing village gossip if kept restrained. For many years the doors were left unlocked, the last person out closed up and switched off the lights, and the first arrival built the fire until an oil furnace ended that task. After Sanborn died in 1938, his will established a twenty thousand dollar trust fund for the club to be invested by a local bank, with forty dollars to be spent each Christmas on children under ten living nearby. Though scientific whittling later declined, century-old cedar fence rails remained stored in the basement, and a guest register accumulated signatures from every New England state and many other states. The club also drew wider notice through a story in Life magazine, welcomed women as well as men, and included U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith among those who signed its register. Sanborn also created its slogan: "The Weary Club of Norway, Maine - Makers and Dealers in Cedar Shavings, Social Gossip, Political Wisdom, and Yankee Philosophy."