The Boxborough Historical Society is having a pot luck dinner and program on Sunday, Feb 22 at the Grange Room in Town Hall. The speaker is Alan Rohwer: “D-Day 64 Years Later”, a slideshow on a trip that Alan and three fellow Minutemen took to Normandy in France.
February, 2009
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Boxborough Historical Society Pot Luck Dinner – Feb 22
Thursday, February 19th, 2009Reminder: Historical Society Meeting Feb 23rd
Thursday, February 19th, 2009The Maynard Historical Society will be meeting on Monday, February 23rd at 7pm.
The meeting will be held in the assembly room at POWDER MILL CIRCLE. Yes, we moved again. We originally moved from Town Hall due to construction to the Fowler School Library, but that turned out to be difficult for many members to get to. So we’re trying another location and see how that works.
The program will be viewing old photographs from Maynard’s not-so-distant history. As a matter of fact the point of the meeting is for members of the audience to help us identify people, places, and events where the Society’s collection notes on the photographs are wanting. We hope it will be a fun way to spend a winter’s evening and we hope many will join us.
Refreshments will be served. The meeting is open to the public.
New Boston Post Cane resource center
Sunday, February 15th, 2009Through a odd twist of fate, the Maynard Historical Society (and, for the most part, I) managed to become a highly cited resource for the Boston Post Cane – a tradition that started in 1909 as part of a publicity stunt for the now defunct newspaper.
We published Ralph Sheridan’s article about losing and finding the cane in Maynard and he included a lot of information about the cane from towns around New England. I started updating the list based on news accounts that I would run into on the web and then people started sending us updates. After a few years we, rather accidently, became a custodian of recent history of the cane.
Keeping this information up-to-date has been a problem for years. In 2008, as part of the overall redesign of the Maynard web site I tried to design a new way of managing Boston Post Cane information and simply didn’t have time to do it properly. After a year of not updating the page because “the new thing is coming” – I figured out a way to get the job done.
And now we have a great set of resources for the Boston Post Cane, just in time for its 100th birthday (the tradition started in August 1909).
While it wasn’t planned, I’m proud to have the Maynard Historical Society (and Maynard) be frequently cited for news and background information on this unique New England tradition, and look forward to providing more and better information in the coming years.
Interested? Head on over to the Boston Post Cane resource site.
Maynard Historical Society Podcast #10
Friday, February 13th, 2009This is a short podcast that introduces the digital version of the 1921 “A Brief History of Maynard” by William H. Gutteridge.
The book was created for the 50th anniversary of the town and is a valuable resource to anyone researching Maynard history.
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The scanned version of the book is available here: A Brief History of Maynard (PDF, 20MB)
The Society also has the original print plates used to reproduce the photographs in the book. Here are a few of them:
This is a close-up of one of the plates:
Here is an aerial photograph plate, and a reversed image to show you roughly what the photo looks like when printed:
The front of the book included a map printed on thin paper (many copies of the book no longer have the map because it is so fragile). This was done with a engraved plate:
Maynard Historical Society Podcast #9
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
In this podcast Dave Griffin discusses one of the more significant historical books in the collection: a 1930 appraisal of the properties held by the American Woolen Company.
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While the Mill and the town were founded by Amory Maynard, as Amory grew older and infirm a new management scheme for the mill was required. In 1862 the ownership of the Maynard Mill complex moved from the Maynard family ownership to a corporation called the “Assabet Manufacturing Company” (of which Amory Maynard, was listed as the “agent”). This corporation lasted through the Civil War.
Assabet Manufacturing Company ran until poor business conditions drove it to insolvency on Dec 31, 1898. It stayed operating under receivership until May 1, 1899 when it was purchased by the American Woolen Company for $400,000. The American Woolen Company was a conglomerate of textile mills in New England and at the time the Maynard Mill was the largest woolen mill in the country with 350 looms.
By the early 1920′s the American Woolen Company had 27 mills, 7,200 looms, and clothed an estimated one in six men in the United States (the cloth was used primarily for men’s suits). By that time, despite its size and expansion to nearly 800 looms and 2,500 people the Maynard Mill was no longer one of the major mills in the company.
The appraisal of the 267 non-mill properties owned by the American Woolen Company provide an insight into what it was like to live in “company town” back then, the living conditions of the mill workers and the town in general. For those people who currently live in one of the properties listed, it provides a unique slice of history about their home.
Here are a few pages from the book:
As part of the digitization of the collection, the entire 209 page appraisal is available for download from the Society’s web site. The file format is Adobe PDF. Please note that this is a relatively large file (90MB), so you don’t want to download it unless you have a reasonably high-speed connection.