FARMINGTON — A grand opening of the new Natalie and Ben Butler Community Research Center was held on Sunday afternoon, June 8, at the Farmington Historical Society’s Titcomb House Museum, 118 Academy Street in Farmington.
“The grand opening was very special,” Jane Woodman, society member said on June 11. “We had family from the Titcomb family that had granted us the house and funds to maintain it. We also had families from the Butler generation. Those two families had a representative or two that talked to us, gave a little background on their family.”
The Natalie and Ben Butler Community Research Center gives Farmington Historical Society (FHS) the opportunity to share its history and genealogy resources with the community.
Between 2019 and 2024, Farmington Historical Society was given $25,000 in grants from the Davis Family Foundation, Woodman said. “One was for $10,000, the other for $15,000. We’re invited to come back to make more applications, which is always a good thing.”
With those grants the research center moved from the planning stage in 2021 to its opening in 2025, a press release notes. Volunteers spent many hours scrubbing floors, making curtains, and moving materials, while workers updated electricity and added ceilings to transform the ell of the Titcomb House Museum into a research center, it states.
“Four years ago Jake Bogar, the instructor for the Foster CTE Center pre engineering program brought his students to the Octagon House and the Titcomb House and they created a blueprint (of the proposed research center area) as part of their studies,” Woodman said. “And it was fascinating, because they had a tablet that could measure the room. Those students have gone on and already graduated from colleges.”
Bogar has another group of students who will do a blueprint for the North Church next year, Woodman said. “That layout, especially of the gathering room downstairs will enable us for anybody who’s renting that room, we can give them a blueprint copy. They can put on paper where they want things like tables and chairs to go.”
With the research center’s opening people can now learn more about Farmington area’s past.
The center “is named in recognition of Ben and Natalie Butler, long-time Farmington residents and historical society members,” the release states. “Their tireless research and publication of six pilgrimage history tours in the 1960s are still valuable research materials. They loved Farmington’s rich history, and it was their aim to share that history with the public.”
The center includes a variety of resources: Butlers’ Pilgrimages, railroad histories, cemetery records, local histories, genealogies, military records, town reports and directories, maps, high school yearbooks, and bound issues of “The Franklin Journal and Chronicle” from 1840s to 1970s, the release notes.
Soon FHS inventory and databases, genealogy and history websites, and more will be accessible on the computer with a printer and scanner available, the release notes.
Society members had talked to Bogar about things they would like to have done, Woodman noted. “It was a good give and take of what could we do for you” she said. “We have used the blueprint because people get curious. Some people see the line drawings and see it well. Other people want to see pictures.”
Woodman said the society welcomes any Foster CTE Center programs that would like to help.
For now the research center will be open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Fridays through October. “People can go on the website to request a different time,” Woodman noted.
For more information on FHS or the research center visit the FHS website, farmingtonhistoricalsociety.wordpress.com, its Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/HappyHistorians, or email [email protected].
