Vol. 2, No. 5                                                                            September 2007

Roundtable Meeting in Troy to Explore Aspects of Cheshire County's Railroad History

The fall meeting of the Monadnock Historical Societies Forum will meet at Kimball Hall in Troy on Thursday October 18th beginning at 9:30 a.m. and hosted by the Troy Historical Society.

The morning Roundtable meeting will be divided into two sessions. The first will be our traditional Roundtable meeting, where attendees will have an opportunity to share with the group their needs, concerns, or what your organization has been up to during the summer and this fall.

After our first session and a short break, around 10:30, we will walk the short distance to the newly restored Troy depot. At the depot, we will explore different aspects of railroad history in Cheshire County. We will do this with personal accounts of individuals who worked or were associated with the railroad, family stories about the railroad, and short historic presentations. If you know of anyone who worked for the Boston and Maine Railroad or has family stories about the railroad, please invite them to join you for this fun and interesting exploration into one of Cheshire County's most important industries.

Once the morning sessions are over we will break for our brownbag lunch at the depot. There are a couple of places around Troy village to also get lunch. After lunch, we will learn more about the restoration efforts of the Troy depot from the main participants and be given a detail toured of the building. For those who might be interested, we will also have an opportunity to tour Kimball Hall, home of the Troy Historical Society.

Important Town Hall Meeting for Historical Organizations at the Historical Society of Cheshire County

On Tuesday October 9th, HSCC will host a town hall meeting organized by New Hampshire Historical Society at 10:00 a.m. NHHS has been carefully studying the issues facing local historical societies/organizations with the goal of learning how to better serve these organizations. Through a grant from The Corporate Fund, NHHS has partnered with several other leading state organizations to present its survey findings and to continue collecting feedback on how these state organizations can serve you better. They have scheduled a series of town hall meetings throughout the state with the first one being held in Keene on October 9th.

This partnership includes Bill Veillette, Executive Director of the New Hampshire Historical Society: Jennifer Goodman, Executive Director of the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance; Tom Haynes, President of the Association of Historical Societies of New Hampshire; and Debbie Watrous, Executive Director of the New Hampshire Humanities Council.

This meeting will include the findings of the NHHS's surveys, information on each of the partner organizations and ideas they have to help local societies, and most importantly getting your feedback. They want to hear from you. The meeting should take about two hours. I encourage you and other board members of your organization to attend. If you have any further questions or need additional information, please contact Tom Haynes at 352-1895 or dired@hsccnh.org, or Bill Veillette at 228-6688 or bveillette@nhhistory.org.

Proposed Topic Change for Next Collaborative Project

A lengthy discussion occurred during the Roundtable meeting in Jaffrey on the topic of the next collaborative project. Schools and education; taverns; libraries, books and printers; mills and mill life; and summer camps were topics discussed. We decided that the next exhibit and publication would be on libraries, books, and printers with a tentative exhibit date of 2009.

In August I learned that Keene State College is celebrating its 100th anniversary of the college's founding in 2009 with a number of different events and activities. I would like for us to consider changing our topic from libraries to schools and education to coincide with KSC's celebration. I will bring this up at the upcoming meeting.

Cancellation of Meetinghouse Open House

With good intentions the meetinghouse sub-committee moved forward to organize a meetinghouse open house last August. In developing this event, it became apparent that time constraints would not allow us to fully develop the project as we had envisioned. I regret and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. The good news is that we have learned how to better organize such a project and we have laid a good foundation to schedule an open house event for next year. We can talk about this possibility at an upcoming meeting.

AHSNH Directory Update

The Association of Historical Societies of New Hampshire is updating its helpful directory. If you have not returned the directory information form that was recently sent to your organization, please take a few minutes to respond so your organization will be represented in the new directory. If you need a form, please contact Tom Haynes at HSCC at 352-1895.

Contact & Web Site Information

For all questions or concerns regarding any aspect of the Monadnock Historical Societies Forum, please contact HSCC's Tom Haynes at 603-352-1895 or dired@hsccnh.org. Please remember to post and share this newsletter with your members. Also, please remember to submit your events for posting on the Roundtable Events page of the Roundtable Forum web site.