Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont internship, for the White River Valley Herald
RANDOLPH — After sitting dormant through the COVID-19 pandemic, the history museum in Randolph was dusty and in need of care. Over the past three years, Randolph Historical Society President Forrest MacGregor has worked to give it a new lease on life.
MacGregor became the president of the society in 2023. Since then, he and many volunteers have worked to restore and organize the history museum on Salisbury Street.
They have taken on projects including the digitization of hundreds of photographs, glass plate negatives, and records. MacGregor and volunteer Devon Blomquist also reassembled a 1940s Simplex film projector, which is now on display at The Playhouse movie theater in Randolph.
MacGregor said that one of the reasons he comes back every week is the volunteers. He named Jessamyn West, Marie Kittle, Sophie Miller, Phil Godenschwager, Lois Dionisio, Kelly Green, Paul Putney, Rachel Putney, Anne Kaplan, and Jon Kaplan as “history heroes.” They help people searching for information on genealogy, respond to inquiries on family history as well as real estate history.
Q. You’re from Asheville, North Carolina. What brought you to Randolph in the 2000s?
A. We moved to Vermont so my second wife could go to law school. I had no intention of living in Randolph, but once we got here we fell in love with it. And it’s proven impossible to leave. Sometimes people here move away to find jobs in the big world, but then when they’re ready to have a family, they come back here, because this is the kind of place you want to raise your kids. It’s a beautiful little town.
Q. What prompted you to get involved with the Randolph Historical Society?
A. There were two people involved in running the society before the pandemic, Larry Leonard and Billy Smith. Larry had decided to sell his house, and I bought it. During the course of doing that, he approached me and asked if I would consider running the historical society. I said sure, I’ve run nonprofits before, and I’ve got some experience in grant writing. I was retired at the time, so it was not much of a burden and it looked like a fairly simple thing to do. It had basically been shut down after the pandemic. I’m not from here, but I’m in the community and I’m a member of that community and I’ve got the time and the interest in the building to work on it.
Q. What has changed the most between 2023, when you took over, and now?
A. The museum is a lot more orderly than it was. It was basically dusty, but there was a lot of stuff in there that needed sorting out. Since I was ignorant to everything in the collection, I had to learn what was important and how it was organized. There was a display cabinet packed with photographic albums from the 1800s, so I decided to put together a project where I would go through every photograph and find every scrap of writing on them. We photographed them all and put them online, made a database of all the names and information, so now you can find photographs that are related to your family. There were a lot of old-timers who helped out a lot, and I had other volunteers. I have a reputation of bringing order out of chaos.
Q. Why do you think it’s important for the Randolph Historical Society to exist?
A. That’s a large question. It boils down to the value of family history. Here, everybody has their family history in a shoebox underneath the bed, with a family Bible, photographs with no identification. We’re so impoverished for history here that we save bottletops from the 1800s, and postage stamps, some pretty silly little things. And a lot of people are worrying about what to do with these mementos from all the prior lives that their children don’t want. I’m kind of taking care of people who don’t know I’m taking care of them. I’m almost religious about not throwing things away, but I’m equally religious about organizing them and making them available. Having a concentrated place where people can actually go to look at things that are related to their history is a big deal.
Q. What’s your favorite bit about being a part of the society?
A. It’s a big puzzle. I’m an engineer, so I like to look at puzzles. So my favorite part of it is bringing order to it all. Trying to figure out how to take a small amount of space and put a lot of stuff in it. And it keeps growing. People are always calling me and asking if I want a photograph of Grandma for the museum, and I tell them that if they had brought me a piece of the original cross, I wouldn’t have room to hang it.
The nice thing about being an engineer is I can do technical stuff that other people could not. The Playhouse took the old projectors out a few years ago and offered them to the society, but they were hauled off to storage. When I found them, I knew how they could be assembled, so me and a helpful volunteer put one back together, then offered it back to the theatre for display.
Q. What do you think the future has in store for the historical society?
A. Several people have talked to me about using it as an education resource, but I have enough to do right now. I’m looking for someone who wants a leadership role; who wants to do more with the museum, open it up more often and put programs together for children. I don’t plan to do this for the rest of my life, but I still want to be involved, and I want to be doing exactly what I’m doing right now, which is caretaking and organizing.