At the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford is a spacious house that was moved across Great Neck Road and re-christened the White House. One room is called the Founders Room, and around the top of its walls runs an honor roll of names.

Fifty-two years ago, these men and women from Waterford, Broadway and the Ivy League launched, on town property, an experiment in theater that could have petered out by the end of the first summer.

Gloriously, it did not. Instead the National Playwrights Conference and the programs that joined it have nurtured some of the finest and most successful American plays, puppetry, musical theater, actors, playwrights, and theater and cabaret professionals of the past half century.

On Thursday, in a great and well-deserved honor, the key founders and current leadership of the O'Neill will be at the other White House. President Barack Obama will award the center the 2015 National Medal of Arts, the nation's highest honor for artists and patrons deemed "deserving of special recognition by reason of their outstanding contributions to the excellence, growth, support and availability of the arts in the United States."

Congratulations to the O'Neill and everyone associated with it, past and present. Long may it prosper, as it indeed now does, still based on the Waterford campus that comes alive each summer with budding works of theater and hums along the rest of the year with college classes in theater.

Congratulations particularly to founders George and Betsy White, Executive Director Preston Whiteway and Board Chairman Tom Viertel, all of whom will be in the East Room Thursday to receive the medal.

Many TV and online viewers have watched the annual presentations of the arts and humanities medal by the president, which will be livestreamed Thursday morning. The ceremony is a cavalcade of celebrities, including actor and singer Audra McDonald, composer Philip Glass and actor/producer/writer Mel Brooks, who will receive medals at the same time as the O'Neill. It's Broadway, Hollywood and Washington all rolled into one glittering ball.

A national story told from the perspective of hometown pride always has another angle as well. Joy was overflowing on Great Neck Road last week when the award was announced. Lifetimes of hard work by our neighbors have gone into this incubator of American theater.

The center is where it is because, as told by longtime president George White — later a director of The Day — he heard in 1962 that his hometown of Waterford had acquired the spectacular shoreline property but would probably burn down the house and barn as training exercises for volunteer firefighters.

Waterford and the world of Broadway might as well have existed in parallel universes if not for the portal opened by the Whites between the two. Some, although not all local officials, and some, though not all academics, got behind the idea of giving a stage to worthy plays not yet ready for full production. The widow of Eugene O'Neill gave permission to use his name.

O'Neill, a Nobel Prize winner often revered as America's greatest playwright, had spent the summers of his youth in the family cottage in New London — now operated by the center as the historic Monte Cristo Cottage. He placed his masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey into Night," and his only comedy, "Ah, Wilderness!" in the city of the early 1900s.

The wedding of O'Neill's name to the ambitious plans was good for the reputations of both. The union of high artistic endeavor and well-grounded local connections gave birth to such shows as "Avenue Q" and "Fences" and such careers as those of Lin-Manuel Miranda, August Wilson, Meryl Streep and Michael Douglas, to name a few. Perhaps even more importantly for the criteria of this award, the O'Neill opened a pathway for regional theaters to produce new works that might and often did earn their way to Broadway.

The town of Waterford shares the credit for leasing the land to the center and giving its blessing for the recent construction of appealing student housing that makes more enrollment feasible. Like every nonprofit arts organization, the O'Neill has to have its hand out for financial support, and the state of Connecticut has been generous, as have hundreds of supporters, many of them who have seen for themselves what amazing talent has been nurtured before their very eyes.

Take a bow, everyone. And a memo to the landlord: This $1-per-year town lease has really paid off.