HEBRON — The Historical Society’s new home on Paris Road is expected to open up the door to a new era in Hebron’s archival storage and research.

“It’s not a lot to look at at the moment,” society President Bruce Conant said Monday of the building that by next fall will be occupied by the society and hopefully many of its now scattered archives.

The society purchased the two-story small house at 358 Paris Road last November. It was owned by the late Richard Bedford.

“He was a historian and genealogist,” Conant said. “He had lots of material (his daughter) wanted us to have.”  The daughter, Maralee Knight, also wanted the society to be able to buy the house, which has several rooms upstairs and downstairs, at a reasonable price, he said.

“We’ve been looking for a home for several years and haven’t been able to find anything we could afford or that was in the right place,” said Conant, who declined to reveal the sale price.

The house sits in the center of the village across the street from the town offices.

Formerly a one-room schoolhouse, it is believed to date to the 1800s.

“We don’t have 100 percent fix on that yet,” he said of the house’s date.

The house has undergone extensive renovations, including aluminum siding over the years, but Conant said he believed the clapboards underneath can be exposed again.

Currently, the society records are housed in the back of the old town-owned Brighton School, another one-room former schoolhouse where the society has a back room to keep records.

“It’s not optimum for organizing archives and for research,” he said.

Eventually they hope to have the building set up with a computer so the public can come in and do research and to house collections of Hebron’s history that are currently in private hands.

“We hope to have people donate artifacts that we couldn’t take previously,” he said.

Conant said there are Hebron artifacts in private hands in Hebron and beyond. “We know where some things are,” Conant said, including in Yarmouth where a former member moved.

The archives go back to the beginning of the town. “There’s a lot I’ve never seen. They’ve been buried in the files,” he said.

Conant said the society was close to dissolving a few years ago, but now with a new home on the horizon, and many new members, it is thriving and growing.

The society’s main goal currently is to complete renovation of the house and pay off the mortgage within three years.

Fundraisers have already been held, such as a bake sale at the polls last November and the luncheon at the annual town meeting earlier this month. An English Tea at the Greenwood Mountain Inn is also set for May 1, but major fundraising efforts through a capital campaign have not yet been arranged.

Electrical work is now being done downstairs and the windows will be replaced, Conant said. The remodeling efforts are expected to be completed in the fall when the society hopes to be in the building, he said.

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