Fitchburg Historical Society

CONTACT:

50 Grove Street, PO Box 953
Fitchburg, MA 01420
978-345-1157
FitchburgHistory.FSC.edu

Elizabeth A. Hannula, Executive Director

DESCRIPTION:

Fitchburg is another one of Massachusetts’ once-flourishing cities that suffered long economic decline, and is now experiencing rebirth — a renaissance. Here, too, philanthropy will play a key role in its recovery, through the new Community Foundation (Cat ’02) and now the Fitchburg Historical Society. Founded in 1892, in its own building since 1912, FHS has an outstanding Collection of 200,000 documentary and material remains from the 1700s to the present — an extraordinarily long, continuous, and comprehensive record of daily life here (e.g., Sentinel newspapers from 1838-1972), in good times and bad, reflecting great national events but rarely if ever influencing them. The Collection is being entered by volunteers in a searchable electronic database for universal Internet access. FHS also uses its treasures creatively for education — last year creating “traveling trunks” for school classrooms, filled with reproductions of period items like Civil War photos, soldiers diaries, and uniforms. Now the Society has a great opportunity for both itself and Fitchburg: it has purchased an historic building on Main Street for renovation as a history museum fully adequate for its superb Collection. Its $2.5 million capital campaign requires reaching out well beyond Fitchburg to succeed — appropriately, since the significance of this new resource also extends well beyond Fitchburg. If you are a history buff, why not be an angel, too?

(2004: CULTURE: Education: Informal: Historic Preservation)