WATERBURY, Vt. — Twice in less than a century, Waterbury’s 1827 Congregational Church, at the crest of a small rise on Main Street, has played a critical role in helping the community escape the ravages of the rising Winooski River and recover after epic floodwaters have receded.

The current pastor, the Rev. Peter Plagge, has a yellowed relic of Vermont’s great flood of early November 1927: The Dec. 7, 1927, edition of the local newspaper, the Waterbury Record, has a photo taken in his church basement. The caption reads, “Where Over 700 Waterbury People Were Served A Bountiful Thanksgiving Dinner By the Generosity of Neighborly Burlington People.”

“It’s the highest point, which is why in 1927 the church was so central because it was the only point in town that was dry,” said Plagge.

Last summer the same church was the community’s emergency shelter where people fleeing Tropical Storm Irene’s floodwaters gathered on Aug. 28 before they were moved to the elementary school, which had electricity throughout the night.

For months after the ’27 flood, refugees and relief workers went daily to the church where hot meals were prepared in the kitchen that has changed little since Calvin Coolidge was president. Now the church serves as a refuge for a local day care center displaced by the flood, and Plagge helps manage a local emergency fund that before the flood would get $10,000 a year. Now it has more than $300,000.

In many ways the descriptions of what happened to Waterbury in 1927 mirror what happened last summer when the Winooski River overflowed its banks, forced scores from their homes, closed businesses, most of the state offices and prompted the evacuation of the patients from the State Hospital.

“People were just walking in the door in a steady stream and everybody wanted to know what was going on,” Plagge said of last summer’s flood. “It was chaos in here. There were babies crying and dogs barking.”

The ’27 flood fundamentally changed the state physically, politically and socially, ushering the state, according to some, into the 20th century. Officials, volunteers and victims working to rebuild Waterbury and the state now recognize what they are doing could have the same long-term consequences, but many are challenged by the more immediate needs for relief.

“Calamities are sometimes divine opportunities God, the General Government and Sister Communities help those who help themselves. Let us invite that help by unitedly taking hold and working mightily,” says a small ad by a Lamoille County bank on an inside page of that same edition of the Waterbury Record that carried the Thanksgiving photo.

“There’s no question this is an event of historical significance and what we do in our recovery is just as significant as the result of ’27,” said Sue Minter, the state’s chief recovery officer and a Waterbury resident. “

Almost since the rain stopped last August people compared the damage caused by Irene to the flood of 1927. As a pure rain event, Irene rivaled the earlier flood from an unnamed storm that ran up the East Coast before stalling over Vermont and western New England. But given other factors, the flood caused 85 years ago still rates as Vermont’s greatest natural disaster.

The 1927 flood killed 84, destroyed 1,200 bridges, ripped up miles of railroad track, paralyzed the state’s nascent road system and left thousands homeless. Irene killed six, damaged or destroyed more than 200 bridges and 500 miles of highway.