Last week was a busy – and somewhat momentous – week at the museum. Thanks to some generous donations to the Hatfield Historical Society by the Zahn Family Foundation and others, we were able to get some much-needed electrical upgrades. These included the following:

• Energy-efficient LED console light fixtures to replace our 4 oldest T12 fluorescent tube fixtures (pictured above, most of which had broken fittings because the bulbs are so darned hard to change!). Not only are the displays and the work area on the east side of the museum now much better lit, but LED lights use much less energy and give off no damaging ultraviolet (UV) light, which will help keep our artifacts safer.
  
• Energy-efficient adjustable, dimmable LED track lights at top of stairs, providing directed light on the stairs, the walkway, and the two exhibit cases. You can now actually see what’s in the cases (yeah!), and we can dim the lights when the museum is not open to the public so we’re using less energy.
• A ceiling fan to push warmer air down during the cold winter months, decreasing the need to turn up the heat in the building overall, and hopefully making it more comfortable for visitors and workers. The fan will also help during the most humid times of year to keep air circulating (the lack of which can combine with humidity to fuel mold growth).
  
• A 20amp circuit so we can run the mobile AC that was donated last winter (by Mary Averill of Montague) without blowing fuses – as we did this past summer.
  

Of course, to have this work done, we needed to move all the artifacts on the east side of the museum, and much of the artifacts along the north and west perimeters, somewhere else in the museum, so it was a large Rubik’s Cube-like moving project. We took the opportunity, though, to 1) clean the artifacts and the museum, 2) photograph all the artifacts moved along with their accession numbers, and 3) pull select items off exhibit so we could better group remaining displays.
 
**If you’re wondering if the museum is still moving to the 2nd floor of the Town Hall, the answer is YES! But it won’t be for another three years (approx.winter/spring 2019), as that space will need to be upgraded after the elevator is installed. The electrical upgrades just installed on the 2nd floor of the library will either go with us, or better serve the library after we leave. Please vote YES for the elevator and other elements bringing the building up to code at this May’s Town Meeting, not only because the museum can’t move without it, but also because it’s the right thing to do. How can we justify not making the Town Hall handicapped accessible when the Americans With Disabilities Act was passed in 1990 – 26 years ago – shame on us! There are a lot of seniors (visitors and volunteers) who can no longer make it upstairs to the museum, and it's just not right.
 
In my next post, I’ll tell you about a few artifacts we discovered during the temporary move that had gotten separated from their partners and some others hidden away that we didn’t even know we had. Come visit and check out the new fixtures and revamped exhibits.

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.

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 

Today was a very productive work morning – this time not in the museum, but in the Town Hall. Many thanks to Historical Society members Bill Parmeter and Linda Golash for spending two-plus hours with me cleaning the eight sets of cheery orange shelves retired from the Smith Academy Library (thank you Principal Scott Goldman and Superintendent John Robert!), then hauling the individual shelves and brackets up to the 2nd floor balcony. The old balcony, from where residents used to watch basketball games and school plays in the auditorium below, is the site of the Historical Museum’s new additional storage space. While some groups of items (like extra boxes of tercentenary booklets) have been stored in Society member's barns or garages over the years due to lack of space in the museum, this will be the first additional inside storage room the museum has seen in FORTY years -- so not something to scoff at!

Many thanks also to Town Crew members William Young, James Lavallee, and Mark Hebert for doing all the heavy lifting of the shelving units, including moving them from SA. And while I’m at it, let’s not forget Historical Society Secretary Amy Hahn and Town Hall employee Cheri Hardy for help in cleaning and prepping the space, Roy Omasta for making the balcony secure, DPW Director Phil Genovese for his support and workers, and our three Selectmen (Ed Lesko, Darryl Williams and Jeff Boyle) for granting us the space in the first place. Phew! I’m tired just recounting the work.

What is shows, more than anything, is how many people (both town employees and volunteers) are necessary to make something good happen. And of course it’s not done yet. Next we have to re-assemble the shelves with their brackets, and either figure out how to lock the wheels more securely and/or add a strip of wood molding to the front of several risers so the shelves don’t travel. Then we have to pack up artifacts from the museum and move them over. But bird by bird, it will happen.

Something else we discovered today as our cleaning enterprise was splayed across the central foyer was that Town Hall is a happenin’ place! Patrons dropped off their census forms in the Town Clerk’s office, their tax bills in the tax collector’s office, visited the Building Inspector’s office downstairs, stopped in to see Town Administrator Jeff Ritter and afore-mentioned DPW Director, arrived for 11 am lunch in the Senior Center downstairs and of course stopped in to fulfill various and sundry needs with the secretaries in the front offices. If the Town Hall Renovation Plan passes in the spring and the Historical Museum gets to move into the second floor of Town Hall (occupying both the parlor and large meeting room), we will be in a great location to get lots of traffic – both with Town Hall employees and its myriad daily visitors.

The idea is that the permanent collection would be housed in the large meeting room, open when the museum is staffed, at least once a week from spring through fall as it is now (but hopefully bumped up to two or three times a week), but that the parlor would house changing exhibits in display cases so that this room could be securely open when the Town Hall is open. As Linda Golash and I walked through those rooms today, with their high ceilings and 1930s period feel, we marveled at how great the space would be to house an expanded Historical Museum. A dream for a new museum space – begun 40 years ago when the Historical Society was founded – may finally come to fruition!