History Of The NHHS Museum

Museums are of all different sizes and show different history within them. The museum I went to is the New Hampshire Historical Society (NHHS) which was founded in 1823, it is located on park street in Concord, NH. Like other museums around the world its mission is to save, preserve, and share history. NHHS is specifically focused on preserving New Hampshire’s history and sharing it. The museum is an independent nonprofit relying on money from visitors, members, and contributions from anyone.
For such a small location they utilize the area very well, on the main floor, they have a library on one end and an auditorium on the other end. Located upstairs they have one main room which holds most of the art. To fully utilize the location, they
have they even have history, mostly in the form of paints located in the halls and on the walls going up the stair landings. This museum showed history in many different ways, paintings/portraits, sculptures, writing, and belongings that had been donated to the museum.
There are many different membership offers available, the more you pay the more benefits you get. Basic memberships are $50 for an individual that can bring anyone under 18 with them, $75 for a couple’s membership. These memberships get free admission to exhibition and the research library, ancestry.com, America: History and Life with Full Text, member-only events, and more. Life memberships are also available $1000 for individuals and $1500 for couple’s. Lastly they have sustaining memberships $10 per month for individual and $15 per month for a couple’s. Life and sustaining members get the same benefits as the basic memberships but they also get free admission to more than 700 museums in North America.
I enjoy going to museums and being able to compare what we have now and how it looks to what people had in the past. The museums I have been to in the past have been larger in size and interactive compared to NHHS. The exhibits were well presented for what they had, although I wish that I would have been able to really look and feel some of the items displayed in the glass cases. In order to be able to display more in the small location the museum had most of their items in special cases. The cases are like dressers, the drawers hold different history in them and glass or plastic covers on them so that you couldn’t touch them and the tops also have a large glass or plastic covering. The rest on display were either in showcases or roped off to not be touched. It is nice to be able to take a walk through history, compare what you see in a museum to what we now have available.
There were four pieces of history that really jumped out at me and I liked being able to look at. First was a dugout canoe, it was made from pine and carbon dating tells that it was made sometime between 1430 and 1660. The canoe was found buried in the sand on the shore of Lake Ossipee, although it is not a whole canoe, it is amazing to see how simple they were at one point in time. Second was Katharine W. Pecker’s wedding dress from 1882, she wore it when she married future governor Frank W. Rollins. Behind the dress is also an image of Katharine wearing it, you get to not only look at the dress but see the original owner in it too. The other two things that were interesting to me was a snowmobile from 1972 and a giant eagle statue from 1818 that was in the middle of the wall on the first landing of the stairs to go
upstairs.
Having to visit a museum ended up being very useful for me, I learned that my paternal great grandfather had worked on and painted one of the eagles which had been in the museum.
Sadly, I did not take a picture of the one there so my family could not tell me if it was still the same one or if it had been changed. In a few months or next year, I want to go back and see if they change the exhibit they have set up in the upstairs room and take a picture of the eagle. Everything in this museum we can take the time to compare to something that we have now and how much it has changed. Some of the history they had showed how it changed over time, like all the different buttons they had on display. Not all pieces of history have known meanings, sometime we can guess what they were used for. New Hampshire Historical Society museum is very focused on sharing New Hampshire’s history, they keep a low admission charge and there are also many ways to get in for free. You can also visit their website to look at their collections and see what the events coming up are. Their collection seen online shows more than what I had seen set up in their small location. The museum was useful in showing the history of New Hampshire and that small museums can still hold a good amount of history in
them.