If you build it ... Cultural Center at Eagle Hill luring audiences to rural Hardwick.

• Position: ENTERTAINMENT & LIFESTYLE

Byline: Richard Duckett

How about building a $15 million cultural center on the campus of a small school in "the middle of nowhere" and having a it offer a full season of programming including top-notch folk, bluegrass, jazz, classical music, community theater, and art exhibits?

Sean Hunley, director of the Cultural Center at Eagle Hill in Hardwick, said if that question had been posed to an outside marketing study team of consultants back in 2005, he thinks he knows what the answer would have been:

"No."

Instead, the Cultural Center is about to begin its fourth season having doubled its ticket sales from season one to season three. "I feel like a grownup," said Hunley, who has grown into his job as the cultural center's director after first coming to Eagle Hill School, a private college preparatory boarding school for students with learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder, as an English teacher. "I think we've been figuring things out as we went along. ... (Now) we know it's sustainable and it's gonna work," he said.

The Cultural Center at Eagle Hill's 2011-12 season begins Oct. 8 with a performance by folk legend David Mallett. Among other highlights of the 16-event performance season will be the Canadian folk/country trio The Good Lovelies, the Irish-American group Cherish the Ladies, The Peking Acrobats, Grant Stewart Quintet (jazz), Worcester Chamber Music Society and the bluegrass group Newfound Road. The Gilbert Players is the center's theater group in residence, and there will be a number of arts happenings such as galley exhibitions and the center's monthly "Art Tea" series.

The venue includes the 463-seat proscenium Abby Theatre, and the versatile 80-seat Kresege Studio Theater

Attendance for the first season (which had a lineup that included Tom Rush, Northern Lights, Kendrick Oliver and the New Life Jazz Orchestra) was 5,000, Hunley said. That number jumped to 8,500 for the second season, and 10,000 last season. The number of subscriptions to the season has doubled every year and currently stands at around 110, he said.

"We found a huge potential audience waiting for cultural opportunities to enjoy," Hunley said.

The cultural center draws people from over 200 zip codes, mostly from Worcester to Springfield but with fans of certain performers traveling from New Hampshire or Connecticut and beyond to see them. Hunley said the core audience is from Hardwick and the town's neighboring communities including Barre, Ware...