Self Guided Tour of Williamstown – Page 32 – Williamstown Historical Museum

Before & After; The Story of a Small Town’s Artifacts & Their Conservation

We hope you will join us!
Saturday, October 3rd, 11 am
at the Williamstown Historical Museum
for the opening of our exhibit:
Before and After; The Story of a Small Town’s Artifacts
and Their Conservation

This exhibit was created by you and for you. Williamstown residents and friends donated the artifacts in this exhibit, voted at the 2014 Annual Town Meeting to have these artifacts conserved, and your interaction with these objects makes them meaningful. Materials donated over the years helped us build a narrative for the objects that allowed us to tell some of the stories of the people and places of our little town. You are an important part of that story. We hope you’ll come admire some of your work. The exhibit focuses on the objects that were conserved at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center using CPC funds. The Pine Cobble Seventh Graders (now eighth graders) contributed descriptive paragraphs detailing some of the objects. This exhibit couldn’t have been done without you. Thank you!

We will have delicious treats for you upon your arrival. We look forward to seeing you next Saturday!

For questions please email sarah@williamstownhistoricalmuseum.org or call 413.458.2160.

Conservation in Williamstown: Its Historic Roots with Phillip McKnight

On Saturday, September 25th, 2015, Phil McKnight presented a lecture on the historic roots of conservation. Phil’s lecture included images of 19th century American Romantic paintings and traced the development of the practice of land conservation here in Williamstown by first briefly tracing the historical development of an American consciousness towards the environment. What were the driving forces which brought northern Europeans to the New World and how did those forces begin to change as we as a people began our westward journey across this vast continent? In what manner did we confront the enormous challenges of the frontier and in doing so, how did we change the natural environment? This story was applied to Williamstown, using both the Williamstown Conservation Commission and the Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation as examples of promoting orderly change within the concept of land conservation.

If you missed his lecture, you can view it online here at the WilliNet website: Conservation in Williamstown: Its Historic Roots

Phil teaches a course on environmental law and environmental history during the fall semester at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams and during the winter term at Williams College.

The West Hoosuck Blockhouse with Dusty Griffin

At 2 pm on Saturday Sept. 19, 2015 Dusty Griffin presented the opening lecture in the 2015-16 Williamstown Historical Museum lecture series. His topic was “The West Hoosuck Blockhouse,” the history of the “blockhouse” or small fort built near the site of the present Williams Inn in 1756, when the little settlement here was still called West Hoosuck. Shortly after the blockhouse was built, at the beginning of the French and Indian War, three of its defenders were killed by a force of Indians moving through the Hoosac River Valley. But the real story behind the blockhouse concerns local disputes about the siting and building of the blockhouse, disputes that sharply divided the settlement and reached the floor of the provincial legislature in Boston, where it was known as the “West Hoosuck Affair.”

The lecture was designed as a companion piece to a talk Dusty gave in 2014 on “The 1746 Attack on Fort Massachusetts.” Dusty is a frequent lecturer at the Williamstown Historical Museum, having talked in recent years on “The Short History of Treadwell Hollow,” “The History of Flora’s Glen,” “The Cincinnati Connection,” “Two Williamstown Soldiers in the 37th Massachusetts,” and “Three Eph Generals in the Civil War.” He has also curated exhibitions at the Museum on “Williamstown in the Civil War” and “Big Days in a Small Town.”

Dusty’s lecture can be viewed on WilliNet by following this link: The West Hoosuck Blockhouse

Dusty is Professor of English Emeritus at New York University, and a past member of the board of the Williamstown Historical Museum.