North Andover Historical Society

Programs: Since it was founded in 1913, the north andover historical society has continued to actively collect, preserve and share our town's history while raising excitement about the town and region's unique cultural heritage. Genealogists, teachers, scholars, researchers and local civic groups regularly utilize the rich resources of our archives. Changing and permanent exhibits, special events, lectures and regularly scheduled public hours at historic properties are some of the many ways that the society brings the local history alive for its constituents. During the past few years, we have developed a strong online presence through our website but more importantly on our facebook page, providing digital access to many photos and other resources in our collections and engaging the viewers in a two way conversation about north andover's past. We are most proud of our 45-year history of working for the school children of north andover. During this time, we have established a close partnership with the local teachers at various grade levels and have offered teacher training and access to primary sources when requested. We have collaborated on the development of social studies kits for grades k-1 to support early learning initiatives. We continue to invite local teachers to contribute post-visit activity materials for a "pop-up" exhibit, which are featured in our history discovery room. In our new venture of saving the textile based programming from the closed american textile history museum in lowell, we have expanded our audience into lowell and lawrence. To do so, we secured a three year diminishing grant from the stevens foundation to support the cost of their former educator on a part-time basis. We will receive our last payment in may 2018. During 2017, we are happy to report that 776 students in the north andover school system participated in 19 programs provided by the society, funded in part by grants from the brown family fund and the rogers foundation. Our new initiative, textile arts programs, served 789 children through 34 programs funded in part by a grant from the stevens foundation. Our barn at the pb property was re-purposed as an educational and visitor center to show case our educational programs thanks to the generosity of the north andover community preservation committee. Last year over 400 visitors explored the parson barnard house & barn during the essex county 17th century saturdays summer program as part of our 21 adult/family offerings. In addition, we fulfilled 203 research requests and served 32 on-site researchers in our library/archives.