LOVELL – The historical society opens an exhibit today featuring the town’s tradition of Old Home Days, a festival for celebrating hometown pride that is common in many New England communities.
The exhibit coincides with Lovell’s upcoming Old Home Days, July 21.
“We would like to generate interest in Lovell Old Home Days,” Cathy Stone, president of the Lovell Historical Society said. “Also, it will help us improve our collection of material. As people see the exhibit, they’ll say, I have old photographs or an old poster.'”
Artist Roger Williams of Lovell has donated T-shirt designs for Old Home Days since the tradition was revived 10 years ago, and his work will be displayed in the exhibit as well.
“I’ve been doing the T-shirts every year. The committee comes up with a theme, and I do the art,” Williams said. “It’s something I do for my community every year.”
Although Lovell’s Old Home Days was first created in 1954 as a fundraiser for the VFW Post and volunteer fire department, the celebration of Old Home Days began much earlier.
The first official Old Home Days took place in New Hampshire in 1899, when the region suffered from a drifting population and abandoned farms. The festival was encouraged by the governor, who wanted to lure back natives who had gone west and south to more urban areas to look for financial opportunities. Gov. Frank West Rollins also wanted to inject money into rural areas.
Many towns around the state set aside a day or two of parades, music, school and camp reunions to entice tourists and the young people who had left.
After 30 years or so of Old Homes Days, which spread to towns mainly in Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont, the tradition subsided because it was costly and considered unnecessary for tourism, according to “The Encyclopedia of New England.”
The Encyclopedia also writes that behind the impetus for the celebration was a concern that the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant population might be overwhelmed by immigrants of Catholic, southern European and African heritage.
But some communities persisted in the tradition that promoted New England as a historical, tradition-laden region valuing community, as the Encyclopedia entry’s writer, Scott Roper, put it. And others, like Lovell, launched the festival in 1954 for new purposes. The town again dropped the festival in 1979, but brought it back just 10 years ago, as a way to bring townspeople together for a festive day.
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