Alice Hardy
New Ipswich Historical Society
On this day - October 1, 1897
William Jurian Kaula diary - no entry
On this day - October 1, 1908
James Roger diary entry - penny postage
1st (Thursday)
Dull and foggy forenoon, clearing after and dry wind S. to S.E. David ploughing in the Davis field. I finished the Marshall lot. Mr. Gordon asked me to extend his lot 6 or 7 feet. Today penny postage began America and Great Britain. Got coat and vest from John Preston today.
The NIHS Annual Meeting - September 29, 2022
The President’s Letter
Present’s Report 2022
It’s been a busy year at the New Ipswich Historical Society. We have opened to the public two days a month during this season. The board met each month. We sponsored four speakers this year, and a four part Zoom program on ‘Exploring Your Genealogy” We improved our Zoom technology. Which can be challenging. We’ve learned a lot, and future Zoom links will be improved.
We stayed within our budget, and did not spend any of our endowment funds. We are in the middle of a huge project of cataloging our collection of documents. This involves finding, sorting, analyzing, and recording in a database each of our paper documents. When compete, we will be able to locate any of our documents by searching by key words. For example we could search for search any records of diaries, businesses, pamphlets, early families, buildings, deeds, and Historical Society projects. Kim Black has headed up this project with some additional volunteers.
Much of our photo collection have been scanned with notes attached, by John Poltrack. John Poltrack has also posted daily updates in a newsletter, featuring old pictures and diary entries.
Margaret Lee has investigated speakers for us and secured funding grants. Pat Lage has kept us legal as a non-profit organization. Michelle Pelletier has been a liaison with the New Ipswich library.
Mitch Gluck has been guiding us through a five year plan exercise. An important goal that has come out of this exercise has led us to how to better tell the story of New Ipswich History.
One possible way to do this would be to reconfigure our building, with individual displays featuring different aspects of our history. Some potential categories could be: Early settlers, Industries, schools, everyday life in previous centuries, fire department, banks, special events, clothing, books, agriculture and farming, Finnish and French-Canadian settlement, furniture makers, Revolutionary, Civil and World War II, churches, and possible rotating exhibits.
This will require verifying the inventory that we have with existing records, probable weeding items that do not relate to New Ipswich history, sprucing up the building, improving display equipment and lighting.
This can only happen with additional help from our membership. If you have any interest or time we can certainly use your help. There will be many interesting tasks and opportunities to use your skills.
We will undoubtedly need some corporate help with bigger projects. We hope to have this work completed within a year. We would continue to sponsor programs history programs throughout the year.
We have also identified some things that better fit in a ten-year plan: Wouldn’t it be nice to have more space, a bathroom, better climate control, internet access, more members, better representation of the 20th century?
Now far into the 21 st century, the New Ipswich Historical Society needs to change. We sometimes have visitors say that they visited when they were in third or fourth grade and now that they are fifty, they decided to drop by and say that nothing has changed.
We need to tell our story better, and be sure that when visitors leave after a visit, that they come away having learned something interesting. We also need to make better use of social media, to communicate to our members.
A few closing thoughts:
The Historical Society has not connection with our historic Town Hall. We are missing an opportunity to have programs at a facility like a town hall. Both Temple and Nelson New Hampshire have have fantastic town halls that are well used. Temple just invested $50,000 in audio visual equipment for their town hall.
Also there is an antique fire truck and another tub pumper fire fighting machine in the old ambulance building. We can get together as a community to preserve and celebrate our town history.
Our goal is to do some part of doing this.
Thank you once again for turning out, and your support.
Sincerely, John Rosenfelder
NH's One-Room Rural Schools: The Romance & the Reality
An interesting presentation by Stephen Taylor followed the President’s remarks.
Thanks John R and John P for all your work to preserve NI history. I am one of many Finnish-French Canadian hybrids. There are many in New Ipswich. Today there is a more diverse population in NI. It is a real cross section of America and I would rank as one of the best towns to live in. A safe rural town close to large cultural centers and areas of high technology. I spent my first 25 yrs there and am grateful for that good fortune. My career as a medical research scientist and professor meant relocation to towns near medical research centers, thus I have lived in Burlington Vt, , Upper Montclair, NJ, and now in rural upstate NY just north of Albany . I visit NI at least twice a year. I am now retired and have more time to look back in time and I appreciate learning about the NI history that I was unaware of.