It was three 5th and 6th grade girls and our town clerk who made my day last Tuesday, helping to answer the question: Why do we save items from our town’s history, anyway? Why not just send folks to the Internet, where they can read up on wars, migrations and how things used to be?

These girls often pop upstairs after school and ask if the museum is open – or if there are any jobs for them to do. I tell them, well, the museum is officially closed so we can work – with open boxes filling the tables and some of the aisles – but that they’re welcome to look around if they’re careful. They check out the WWII cigar thank you letters and the schoolchildren letters sent in 1911 to a sick classmate (Johnnie Winters). Then one of the girls (Grace, Rose or Lily) glances around the WWII exhibit case and asks if the blood-stained Bible is still on display. I tell her no, since the Civil War exhibit has been replaced, but, I could show it to them all the same.

I have to reach up high to get it, and carefully bring it down. Over at a clear table I show them the exquisite custom blue box made for the pocket 1863 New Testament by paper conservator and bookbinder Daniel Gehnrich. The box and repairs on the book were funded by the town’s Community Preservation Act. Prior to that, it had been wrapped in saran wrap, resting on a wire plate holder. I show them how the box doubles as a display stand so we don’t have to handle it, and where the supposed bullet hole used to be, amidst the blood-stained pages.

Together, we wonder how the blood got there, and what happened to the soldier. They read the label and see it was donated by a Dr. C.S. Hurlburt of Springfield, a dentist, who married Mary Wait Allis of Hatfield.

Sitting next to me on the table is a book I had gotten from the town clerk (Lydia Szych) earlier in the day, to add some numbers to our recently completed Mass Humanities-funded medical history grant, and it occurs to me these curious-minded girls might find the book as interesting as I did. I have them read me the title on the spine: Record of Dangerous Diseases, Town of Hatfield.

The book records all of the town’s infectious diseases between 1915 and 1944, including an outbreak of measles in 1918 (53 cases!) among schoolchildren and several hundred case of influenza in 1918-1919, resulting in at least 11 deaths. Coincidentally, Rose had just been looking at a book in the library downstairs that talked about the very same flu epidemic – and here was the Hatfield record of cases in our town.

We note that a girl of 7 who lived on Bridge St. contracted mumps on the same day, Nov. 17, one hundred years earlier. Likewise, Grace notes that someone contracted influenza on her birthday in October, nearly 100 years ago. They all make sad noises upon seeing that two of the children who contracted whooping cough in  Dec. 1915 and Jan. 1916 – a 1 year-old and a 2-1/2-mo.-old. – died (see center image above).

One of the girls’ phones rings, and it is getting late, so I tell them to come back another day. I hear them say to each other going down the stairs,“that was fun…” And I think, yes, that was fun, and it reminds me why we are here.

When you’re taking small steps over a period of years, and still haven’t reached your ultimate goal (moving the entire museum -- storage and display -- to the Town Hall), it is easy to get frustrated and emotionally tired. Last Wednesday was one of those days when I was able to recall how far we’d come. Myself and six other Historical Society volunteers (see names and photo below) put the museum’s storage space in the Town Hall Balcony back together following the construction project that is nearly finished on the first floor.

We cleaned, removed the protective plastic from the artifacts (the sheeting will now serve as our emergency tarps), moved a group of artifacts from the Community Room back into the balcony, and reorganized. Nearly two months before, Pat Cady, Linda Golash and I cleaned and covered the artifacts and moved the oversized artifacts out.

Countless earlier work parties ID-ed, boxed and moved artifacts and supplies from the Historical Museum to the balcony – without the benefit of an elevator. And prior to that, we cleaned metal shelving units and old lab tables donated by Smith Academy – all of them quite heavy – generously carried upstairs by DPW crew members. Prior to that, the town added locking doors to what had been an open space.

But last week when we finished our work and surveyed the space, it looked like a real museum storage room, instead of a gymnasium balcony (just don’t trip on the risers). Now there is a wall where there used to be the balcony knee wall. Now there are attractive energy-efficient Palladian-style windows, tightly sealed so the humid vapors from the first floor air conditioners don’t vent into the space. The vent in the floor has been covered. The old bits of this and that have been removed. It is not everything that we need (for one thing, we need lights…), but it goes a long way toward providing protection and climate control for the town’s artifacts that will no longer fit into the Historical Museum. Equally important, it has allowed us to make the Museum visitor friendly, without boxes stacked up everywhere.

This will be an ongoing process, with many more work parties to come before we’re standing in the newly re-opened Hatfield Historical Museum on the 2nd floor of the Town Hall. We’d love to have your help, or your donations, or your kind words of support, reminding us that each step gets us closer to the goal. And boy, that ribbon-cutting is going to be sweet!

Check out some snapshots from along the way as the Town Hall balcony became the Historical Museum Storage.

Our exhibit on Polish Immigration in Hatfield will be coming down in September, which means we’ll have two large cases to fill. We will replace one case with an exhibit on Medical Care in Hatfield in Years Past -- and we’re very excited about that, with museum volunteers Linda Golash and Vivian Kinzler taking the lead. Details to come in a future post. But that doesn’t leave us any extra time or people to develop an exhibit for the second of the two large cases. What to do?

Whately saves the day. Last week we were visited at the museum by two members of the Whately Historical Society (Adelia Bardwell and Jane Grybko) because we had some duplicate local book items to deaccession and thought they might be interested. We got to talking about exhibits and how this year they didn’t have quite enough artifacts in their Whately Postal History exhibit to fill their cases, so they ended up doing a case of recent acquisitions.

Brilliant. What a wonderful idea! Why didn’t I think of that? Not only would it make the donors happy, but it would have broad appeal and be relatively quick and easy to assemble. It would also help us gauge interest for future exhibits.

"The Loud, the Weird and the Wonderful: A Sampling of Recent Acquisitions" will now be our second exhibit opening for Fall Festival on Oct. 6, 2013. Thank you Adelia and Jane!

**And if you'd like to check out the Whately Historical Society's Recent Acquisitions, as well as their look back at Whately Postal History and their perennial exhibit on Whately Potters, their museum is open every Tuesday morning from 9 am to 12 noon, or by appointment by calling 413-665-3837. 

I have to say it’s helpful when you’re working for a small historical society museum to have a spouse who’s a technology guy. My husband Holly just found a QR code generator called delivr. A QR code (QR stands for Quick Response) is that bar code-like mosaic that you see cropping up on signs and labels. You point your smart device (phone or tablet) at the QR code, and it immediately takes you to a Web location (be it a website, audio or video file, image, etc…) I haven’t paid them much mind because I don’t have a smart device, but I don’t want our museum to miss an opportunity with all those people who are using mainstream technology.

OK, back to my story. I just went to delivr, pasted in our website address, hit ENTER, and generated the code. (Will that really take people to our site?) We took my husband’s smart device, pointed it at the code at right, and straight away it opened up the Hatfield Historical Society home page. It only took a few moments, no joke. And no typing! Check it out.

Now, in addition to putting our web address on our program flyer and event posters, we can add this QR code to make it faster and easier for people to find us.

But say I want to use a QR code in the museum to send folks to an audio clip that goes with an artifact – like 102-year-old Mary Riley Pickett talking about the old hand-cranked phone (below) and the “party line” phone system in Hatfield. 

I went to our free audio hosting site SoundCloud (see prior blog post), copied the URL for the audio clip, pasted it into delivr and presto -- here it is.Try it!

We’re also curious to know if e-readers like Kindles and Nooks can read the codes. Let us know how or where you’ve used QR codes, and what you like or don’t like about how they’re used.

* By the way, if you happen to be upgrading your tablet and have an earlier model you’d consider donating to our “cozy” museum (that’s old-fashioned code for not enough room and tight exhibit spaces), we’d love to let our visitors who don’t have smart devices yet (most of them) still be able to access additional stories about artifacts – without taking up more room. (You never know unless you ask...)

Thursday marked the first day of the “Collections Management and Preservation Project” for the Hatfield Historical Museum. Approved at Town Meeting in May 2012, and funded by the town’s Community Preservation Act, this grant allows for the start of an official inventory of the museum’s collection, which will be done by me, the curator. That inventory starts with 1) our backlog of donated items, and 2) the two categories of artifacts most at-risk in our current space – paper and textiles.

Why do we need to DO an inventory, you ask?

Coincidentally (or maybe by alignment of the stars), I received the “Collections Caretaker” e-newsletter from the Northern States Conservation Center Thursday morning – Day 1 of the project. It couldn’t have been more apt. Rather than paraphrase the start of her piece, I’m just going to let Peggy Schaller say it because she puts it so well:

Regular inventories protect collections
by Peggy Schaller

Why are periodic inventories important?

Inventories are an important function of museum collections management. There are two reasons for doing periodic inventories. The main reason is to keep track of your collections. You cannot display or otherwise use what you cannot find. If you cannot find it, you have not lived up to your public trust responsibilities regarding your collection and the object might just as well be gone. And how do you know it is not gone? Maybe there has been a theft of which you are not aware?

Secondly, periodic inventories allow you to monitor the condition of the objects. Doing an inventory forces you to look at each individual artifact as you are verifying that it is where it is supposed to be. This is the perfect opportunity to make an examination of the current condition of your objects. If that small crack you noticed last time has gotten bigger, maybe the environmental controls need to be checked. If there is evidence of insects where there was none before, maybe you have an infestation that needs to be dealt with. Many small or large changes can be caught by regular examination of your collection.

***

Ms. Schaller notes the two primary reasons for doing periodic inventories. These reasons become all the more pressing when the initial inventory has not been done. The majority of the items on display and in storage in our museum have collection numbers and have been logged into a museum accession register, but the register only gives a brief name of item, name of donor and collection number. The register does not give condition or a detailed description of the item, contact info for the donor, category, or a photo. Nor does it include its location in the museum. So the chances of being able to find one of some 5,000+ artifacts when a visitor comes looking, are, well, pretty slim.

The inventory that results from our “Collections Management and Preservation Project” will fill in this missing information and store it all in a computerized database (we use Frostbow Collection Manager 3, which I’ll write more about in a later post). We’ll also have accession sheets and a hard-copy printout for each completed artifact record. With this information at our fingertips, we will be much better positioned to serve the community and researchers alike.

Why hasn’t this inventory been done before? Mostly because it takes many more hours than the all-volunteer Hatfield Historical Society members (including myself) could afford to give. Which is where the grant comes in. Thank goodness for the Community Preservation Act (see some other historic preservation projects here) and a Community Preservation Commission that values the town’s history and heritage enough to support this work.

 I’ll be making periodic posts as the work progresses and will be sure to let you know about interesting discoveries.

You might think that museum preservation work all takes place inside under artificial lights, wearing white cotton gloves and maybe a headband magnifier. It’s a nice thought. In our overcrowded museum, the surface of the so-called “work table” has not even been seen for, oh… I’m guessing five to seven years? It was like that when I arrived several years ago, and there have been too many other pressing tasks for it to rise to the top of the list yet. But, I diverge.

A few days ago I actually got to do some preservation work outside in the fresh air. I was cleaning dirt and mold off a mid-20th century (or older) leather doctor’s bag with mild soap and water. The bag, recently donated, has a tag attached that says it belonged to Dr. Bonneville, one of Hatfield's in-town doctors for decades. It cleaned up great, and I’ve been airing it out outside on dry days since then, trying to get rid of the smell of mold.

While working, I was thinking, you can’t really do this inside. Even next to a large window and a fan blowing out, how do most museums handle this sort of work? Or do they never accept artifacts that come to them with mold? What if it’s a historic piece that you really want? When I first brought the Dr. Bonneville bag home –he was a WWI army doctor who lived on Main St. next to the Town Hall, and was one of the town’s two beloved in-town doctors for years and years—my husband told me he didn’t want the bag in the house for the same reasons I didn’t want it in the museum. (I didn’t want to contaminate other items, or be breathing in the mold spores.) Until I could clean it, he made me put it in a bag in the back of my car. After cleaning, though, it was much better, and it’s been allowed to come into the mudroom at night, and sit outside under a little roof during the day.

What we really need in our museum, I thought, as I slowly worked my way across the bag’s surface, inside and out, is a little courtyard. A space protected from the wind and rain with room for a tall, sturdy lab table. It would open off the museum workroom, or maybe off the hallway, and have some benches and shelves available in a secure holding place. And a sink. Oh yes, a sink.

Well, I’ve got the lab tables, donated a year or two ago by Smith Academy, our local high school. Now I just need the courtyard, the hallway, and the sink. Oh, yes, and the larger, climate-controlled museum space to go with it. Come to think of it, we'll get most of that when the museum moves to the second floor of the Town Hall, after the elevator is installed. An open-air, second-floor courtyard will be tough, though. Hey, a girl can dream.

Many thanks to the donor of Dr. Bonneville's bag, Joe Pelis of Hatfield, who purchased it at a yard sale on School St. in Hatfield in the mid- to late 1990s. It will look great in an exhbit on Hatfield doctors and nurses we hope to put together in the next year or two. If you have other artifacts to donate that might go along with this, please give me a call or send me an email.

Great visit at the Historical Museum tonight from the Hadley Historical Society (the other “HHS”) for their June program. What a nice group of people, and boy were they troopers to stay an hour in our sauna-like 2nd floor museum which had reached 90 degrees by 8 pm! It was wonderful to be able to exchange similar stories, not only about our collections but also about our shared history. The settlers of Hatfield were Hadley settlers until 1670 when they petitioned the court to grant them a new town across the river. The Hatfield ferry across the Connecticut River on North Main St., as well as the short-lived bridge off the south end of town in the early 1800s was their ferry and their bridge too.

One member had worked with Ambassador Ryan, perhaps our museum’s most generous benefactor, in the Foreign Service, another member had worked with Mary Lou Cutter, former Historical Museum and Farm Museum Curator, as a fellow teacher. I wonder what artifacts each collection holds from the early days (1660s-1670s) that we might be able to share with each other? I look forward to visiting the Hadley Historical Collection sometime soon!

Well, my opportunity to make a pitch for the new home of the Hatfield Historical Museum – a climate-controlled, centrally located, above-ground home – within the context of the Town Hall Renovation Project (Article 22) – came and went at Tuesday night’s briskly-paced Town Meeting. I was so focused on what I was going to say that I didn’t hear the moderator call for discussion, and when no one raised their hands, he immediately moved to take a vote. I jumped up to the mic, aghast, but it was too late! No explanations or supporting statements from the BOS (Board of Selectmen) who proposed the Article (other than the Select Board Chairman’s introductory remarks – which was unusual in itself). No questions from the Town. And no discussion.

Surprisingly, even without any discussion, a simple majority voted IN FAVOR of the $5.4 million article (69-55), but it was not enough to meet the two-thirds vote required.

Had I not missed my opportunity, this is what I wanted to say to Hatfield residents, Historical Society members and those interested in protecting history (with a few revisions given that the Town Meeting has passed):
x

Time to fund our visions

 I support the renovation to the Town Hall for many reasons, but the one that I know the most about has to do with the Hatfield Historical Museum. The Town Hall Renovation would provide four climate-controlled rooms to safely store and display the town’s historical collection, all on the second floor. Since the Historical Society was founded in 1970 (41 years ago) – at which time the all-volunteer Society organized the town’s historical artifacts – the museum was overcrowded, and every curator since then has petitioned and/or begged the town to provide a larger, more climate-controlled space in which to house artifacts that have been collected and saved by townspeople for the last 300 years.

We recently hired a consultant (Museum & Collector Resource) to measure our collections and determine the amount and type of space needed to appropriately house our artifacts. The results of that report, including reviews of plans for both the Town Hall Renovation and the Library Renovation, can be found on the Links & Resources page by clicking HERE, but their review of the rooms earmarked for the storage and display of the Historical Museum Collection in the renovated Town Hall was very favorable.

The town’s collection – and it IS the town’s collection, owned by the Town of Hatfield, administered by the town’s Historical Commission, and cared for and managed by the nonprofit Historical Society – is an irreplaceable group of historic artifacts that Historic Deerfield or Historic Northampton or any other popular local history museum would jump at the chance to own. BUT, what we don’t have, is a climate-controlled, properly-sized location in which to store and display our treasures. Each year that passes, our collection grows more at risk. And we miss additional opportunities – because of lack of space – to be educating and inspiring young and old about history, our history. 

Some might say we can’t fund a project as big as this when the local economy is weak and when there are so many other capital expenditures on the docket – that it is not a “good time” to spend this kind of money. But when is this not the case?

Many of us who are homeowners have had to make difficult decisions over the years about spending money we didn’t have at the time to maintain or improve our homes – both to be proactive and prevent emergency repairs and to protect our investment. Why shouldn’t we also take responsibility for our town and its buildings in like fashion? Just because we have done it this way in the past doesn’t mean we can’t choose to do it better in the future.

If not now – then when?

The Town has held meetings and funded multiple studies to help us “envision” what we’d like our downtown to look like, but if we are never ready, as individual voters and taxpayers to fund those visions, then the vision of our Town Center as a thriving, bustling place where people come to do business, socialize, exercise or study may soon be replaced by a center littered with empty “historic” buildings awaiting demolition.

I support the Town Hall Renovation for this year, 2011, while we can still protect the investment in our Town Hall and Town Center.

Our town employees deserve better, our Town Hall deserves better, our seniors getting services from the Senior Center deserve better, and our town’s Historical Museum deserves better.

***

I urge you to take responsibility for our town, your town, as you do for your home, by voting to FUND Question 1 (Renovating Memorial Town Hall) on Tuesday at the ballot box.

And if enough of us do, then we will have another chance to vote FOR this renovation at a Special Town Meeting, presumably next fall.

Thank you for listening!

--Kathie Gow, Curator, Hatfield Historical Museum