OXFORD — The Oxford Historical Society has just about everything it needs – a museum house adorned by furnishings and other possessions of the family that donated it. It has valuable community relics, like school furniture of Oxford’s old school, mill equipment and machinery that represent its early industry, local businesses’ signs and postal and customer mail boxes from its original post office.

What it does not have, after being closed for more than 20 months due to the coronavirus pandemic, is current members’ support and volunteers to help share the museum’s treasures with the community.

“The pandemic, and being closed, has really hurt our membership,” said the society’s President and Geneologist Patricia Larrivee last week.

“We are working to get more people to join and interested. Working with the [new] historic preservation committee will be another way.”

Just before the pandemic hit, longtime Curator Sandy Dunn retired and moved out of state, creating a void that could not be filled while everything was shuttered. Now Larrivee is doing her best to reorganize, prioritize and fulfill her vision for a vibrant and active historical program. But she needs help to get there.

“It’s unfortunate that we just don’t have enough volunteers to have the society open,” she said. “I’m filling the role of president, secretary and assisting the treasurer. We usually are open from April until October and it’s been almost two years.

“We need donations, we need benefactors and people who are interested in the history of Oxford, to help maintain the Kay House building and get restarted.”

Among the capital needs for OHS is a climate controlled room where paper records are preserved.

“We have some really, really old stuff, original poor farm records that I’ve been scanning and putting in plastic sleeves to preserve them,” she said. “I’ve just started working on them. Yesterday I found this box that held little slips of paper that list the poor farm families. The town would pay families to take care of the poor, they called them paupers.

“It’s amazing what they’ve been able to save over the years. But now it’s important to digitize them, get them scanned and properly store them. We don’t want them to disappear.”

Although the Kay House Museum had its first open house of the year last month, with a second one set for August 14 from 2 to 4 p.m., Larrivee says that realistically she will not be able to bring back programs and events until next year.

“There is so much to do but we won’t be able to really start until next spring because we haven’t been open and we only keep the house open until October,” she said. “We drain the pipes and don’t heat the building through the winter.”

Larrivee also wants to hire an historical archivist to come do forensic work on the museum’s walls.

“We would like to find someone who can date wallpaper,” she said. “At one of the old churches in town they hired someone from Minot to assess it; he removed some paint from the wall and they discovered an old mural behind it.

“The Center Meeting House was built about the same time and before its interior gets repainted we should have that consultant come chip at some sample spots to see if there might be more there.”

Larrivee sees that kind of research as the basis for historical presentations to benefit the historical society. She feels it is time to revisit other topics that the museum has hosted talks on in the past, like Oxford’s early schools and community leaders like Dr. Beryl Moore, a female doctor and the only one in town who delivered babies, and Marjorie Remick, the president of Bliss Business College, who was born on Pleasant Street just down the road from the Kay House.

“There are lots of stories to be told from our collections here,” Larrivee said.

The Oxford Historical Society was founded back 1981. Its current trustees are largely its original trustees, a dedicated group that has worked to protect the community’s history for the last 40 years. There are no more than a half dozen volunteers currently available to keep things going.

Larrivee, who only became involved four years ago, says it is important to establish new officers on the board of directors and attract engaged members and volunteers. She has not sent out membership renewal notices since the pandemic began, feeling it was not the right thing to do during a health emergency. But the fallout of standing back since 2019 and not being able to hold the annual meeting in 2020 is that currently there are only about 20 paid memberships on the roster.

“My plan is to build membership back up, do more open houses,” she said. “We have these great ideas and we need volunteers to get them going. With the historic preservation committee starting, we’ve talked about bringing back Old Home Days, local parades and events for kids.”

Larrivee joined the historical society through genealogy, for which she has a passion and has pursued for 25 years.

“I came here for genealogy. I’d lived in Oxford for years and didn’t even know we had a museum,” she explained. “When I joined I saw the need for help so I threw my name in the hat to be president, and I’ve been doing it since.”

Some of the changes Hatch made during her early tenure include making collections more available to the public. The school room exhibit, now set up in one of the Kay House’s “back houses” had been in one of the museum’s upstairs bedroom, which is not handicapped accessible. She did the same with Oxford’s military collection, establishing the artifacts in a downstairs room called the Military Room.

One of the displays in the Military Room is dedicated to Merle Jack, the last man in Oxford to ever be drafted. It includes his service uniform and the wedding gown of his bride, Deborah Reynolds Jack. The pair married on Jan. 27, 1973 when he returned home from his service.

The Kay House decor is pristine in relation to its age but it is also in need of rehabilitation. The organization had enough money in its coffers to fix the leaking roof, but not enough to repair the water damage to interior plaster.

“You can see in the ceilings where there is plaster damage,” Larrivee said. “We need donations to repair that, even if someone knew how to do plaster work and could volunteer their time.

“The message is that we need new members, we need people to renew, for the museum to flourish. We need to reinvigorate membership and add new fundraisers to help with maintenance. It’s about getting people interested in their community again.”

The next open house for the Oxford Historical Society will be August 14 from 2 to 4 p.m. Its annual meeting will be on August 18. The next Oxford Historic Preservation Committee meeting will be Sept. 9 at 5 p.m. at the town office.

All Oxford residents – full time and seasonal – are invited to participate. Please call the Kay House Museum at (207) 743-0569 for more information.

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