February, 2010

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History of Maynard, Massachusetts 1871-1971 now available online

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

Just over a year ago we released a digital version of the 50th anniversary (1921) history of Maynard by William Gutteridge.

After completing that project we sought a sacrificial copy of the 1971 history of the town so we could make that important document available to everyone.  Roy Helander was kind enough to donate one of his paperback copies and it sat in my “to do” box for several months — it’s a hefty book and it would take some time.  I needed a couple of pages scanned for an upcoming presentation, so today seemed like a good time to attack this project.   Armed with a microplane rasp I removed the adhesive binding and then carefully worked the pages off the staples that held the book together.  It was scanned at 200 pixels/inch – which makes for a nice file size and is reportedly a good resolution for OCR (optical character recognition).  I processed the file with Adobe Acrobat’ s OCR and it cranked away for a few hours. The results were pretty good (as OCR goes)!  So the text of this book is also searchable (I wouldn’t trust it 100%, but my random sampling implies that it works pretty well for casual searches.)

So here we are in February 2010 and the second major history of Maynard is now available on any computer in the world.  (I wonder if the 3rd one will even make it to paper?)

If you look at the book the last page is 234, but due to the way it was published pages with photographs weren’t numbers.  The actual page count is 366, not counting the cover pages.  So this is a substantial work and full of wonderful details about Maynard.  It is the current bible for town history buffs and we hope you will take advantage of this electronic copy.

You can download it from the Maynard Historical Society web site.  The file is just under 100 megabytes:

The History of Maynard, Massachusetts 1871-1971 (pdf, 95MB – right-click to download)

The book was published by the Maynard Historical Commission and encapsulates the work of numerous people, many in the Maynard Historical Society, in anticipation of Maynard’s Centennial celebration.  1000 copies were printed (400 hard-bound and 600 soft-bound).

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Maynard Historical Society Meeting – Feb 22, 2010

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

A quick reminder that we will have our regular monthly Society meeting on Monday, Feb 22nd, at 7pm. As usual we will meet in the lower level of Town Hall.

February’s program will be on the Maynard Dramatic Club. Roy Helander, who was a thespian in the club for many years, will talk about the history of the club, which started in 1936 and produced plays through the 1970s. We hope a few other past members of the club along with some former audience members will help share some memories of this popular arts organization.

As always our meetings are open to the public and light refreshments are usually served after the meeting along with some time for socializing. We hope to see you there.

Our March 2010 program (March 22) somewhat continues the theme of February’s program only we’ll go wide instead of deep. In March, Dave Griffin and Paul Boothroyd will cover the history of many of Maynard’s well-known and not so well-known clubs and societies. Before radio and television anchored people into their living rooms every night, people actually went out and socialized with each other. Starting with the Iola Lodge of Good Templars in 1866, dozens upon dozens of clubs and societies sprang up along the streets of Maynard. While organizations like the Knights of Columbus, Masons and Elks are still known today, many more are shrouded in history: Eagles, Odd Fellows, Nashoba Tribe, Knights of Pythias, Loyal Order of Moose, Maynard Cricket Association, and the D.Y.W.Y.K. Club to name a few (and if you want to know what those initials stood for, come to the meeting!)

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