Living History Day with the Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation
Saturday, November 1st, 11:00 am
Do you enjoy working with hand tools? Are you interested in preserving our cultural history? If so, we invite you to join the WRLF and the Williamstown Historical Museum on Saturday November 1st at Sheep Hill in this hands-on project to restore an antique horse-drawn work sled donated to the WRLF by Henry Flynt. These sleds were used to bring logs and firewood and sap collection barrels out of the woods in the winter and are an important part of our local heritage. We hope Mr. Flynt will be on hand to give us a brief history of the sled.
Art Evans will lead the restoration of this local artifact.
All are invited to share in a light lunch, and to watch a film called Ben’s Mill, about the construction of a similar sled in Vermont in the 1970s.
John L. Sprague in front of 87 Marshall Street, North Adams
87 Marshall Street, John L. Sprague remembers it well. Please come on June 8th to hear him talk about his experiences there. John spent 11 years as the president of the Sprague Electric Company, founded by his father, Robert, who moved the company from Quincy to North Adams in 1929. He was in charge in 1984 and 1985 when new owner Penn Central moved the company’s international headquarters from the Berkshires to Lexington and eliminated 700 Sprague jobs in North Adams. That move, the Berkshire Eagle later reported, “left a legacy of bitterness in the city,” even though Sprague didn’t completely leave North Adams until the early 1990s.
87 Marshall Street, the title of John Sprague’s latest book, is an address in North Adams which, between the late 19th century and today, has been the home of three world-class enterprises, the Arnold Print Works, Sprague Electric Company, and MASS MoCA. Dr. Sprague will trace the history of the Northern Berkshires as it has transitioned from an industrial to a post-industrial economy and speak to the all important question, what comes next?
Bio:
Born in 1930, John L. Sprague was educated at Princeton (AB-Chemistry, 1952) and Stanford (PhD-Chemistry, 1959). He served as a line officer in the US Navy during the Korean War, including 2 years in Naval Electronics. He joined the Sprague Electric Co. in 1959 as a research scientist and retired as CEO in 1987. Since then he has headed a small consulting firm, John L. Sprague Assoc., now headquartered in Adams, MA. He has served on the Board of Directors of more than a dozen public and private firms, mostly in technology industries.
He is the author or co-author of more than twenty articles, primarily in technical journals, and holds six US and three foreign Patents. His first book, Revitalizing US Electronics: Lessons from Japan was published by Butterworth-Heinemann in 1993.
John and his wife, Jid, live in Williamstown. They have four children and 10 grandchildren.
One of the leading features of small town life is that on several occasions during the year a substantial part of the population, young and old, gathers at some central place for a townwide meeting, a parade, or holiday festivities. These events are a means to bring everybody together and to reaffirm their participation in a small community. Community celebrations will be the topic of both our new exhibition curated by Dusty Griffin.
These townwide events are a prominent part of the Williamstown’s annual calendar, and have been going on for a long time. Some events — Town Meeting, Memorial Day, Independence Day – have been recognized or celebrated for more than a century. The Williams College commencement exercises have drawn large numbers of townspeople ever since the early 19th century. Others are relatively new – the Holiday Walk, for example. Some, an annual feature for many decades, are no longer celebrated: the Fireman’s Ball, the Grange Fair. And even the ones we continue to celebrate today have not always taken the same form.
This exhibit looks at a number of the townwide events in Williamstown, and by means of old photographs, posters, programs, newspaper clippings, and other artifacts traces how these occasions have been celebrated over the years.
Bio:
Dusty Griffin taught English literature at Berkeley and NYU for 40 years before retiring in 2009. A 1965 graduate of Williams College, he has published a number of scholarly books on 17th- and 18th-century English poetry. He has also written on topics in Williams College history, and on the local history of Williamstown. He has frequently given talks on local history in the Williamstown Historical Museum lecture series, most recently on “Three Williams Generals in the Civil War” (2012). He serves as chair of the Exhibitions Committee, and has curated an exhibitions at the Museum on “Williamstown in the Civil War” (2011). His talk in May on “Big Days in a Small Town” coincides with the opening of his exhibition at the Museum on “Big Days in a Small Town.”
This approximately half hour program was filmed at the Harper’s Center. In this video, Williamstown Senior Citizens share their memories of celebrations in the Williamstown of their youth.
