Madison Historical Society Launches Centennial Campaign
With a full year’s worth of celebrations already underway, the Madison Historical Society (MHS) launches its 2017 Centennial Campaign on Saturday, July 15 to continue the anniversary celebrations and help lead the society into its next 100 years.
MHS, founded in 1917, manages historical properties around town and aims to collect, preserve, and educate the public about the history of Madison. To celebrate 100 years as an organization, the MHS created the Madison A-Z project to highlight what is unique about the town, created a display of vintage images of downtown in storefronts along the Post Road, and organized the creation of pop-up exhibitions of items of special interest from the collection of more than 6,000 objects. The society also served as grand marshal of the Exchange Club’s annual July 4th parade.
Following the goal to “Preserve Our Past, Protect Our Future,” the society aims to raise $100,000 by the end of 2017 to help expand educational programing, preserve the society’s physical properties, and continue the society’s collection of special events including tours, antique fairs, and the Frederick Lee Lectures.
MHS President Jim Matteson said it made sense to go for $100,000 in the society’s 100 years. He said donations have already started to roll in even before the official launch of the campaign.
“We wanted to get some contributions in early before the announcement and we have done that,” he said. “So far we have $35,000 in. I think the remaining $65,000 is going to take work to get it—not that it didn’t take work to get this—but we do have 35 percent of our goal in at this point.”
MHS Executive Director Jennifer Simpson said the funding will go toward expanding educational programming that already exists in partnership with the school district. In addition, Simpson said the money could also hopefully bring on another staff member to revive some other education programs.
“What we would also really love to do is bring on someone who could curate that collection so that we could do other educational programing based on our collection,” she said. “One of the things we use to do was called ‘Conversations with the Curator’ and that was really bringing out a piece from our collection that was special and we would bring in an expert along with members of our board and talk about that piece.”
Overall Simpson said programs like this help MHS remain a vibrant part of the community.
“We are always looking for ways to add value and have more diversity in what we offer and be a really vibrant civic organization in the community so that people look to us for other opportunities to learn more about the history of the town,” she said.
While some of the money raised will go to expanding the MHS’s offerings, another portion will go to supporting what the society already does, including maintaining some historical buildings. Matteson said repairing some of the buildings can easily exceed the annual budget, including expenses like putting on a new roof or repairing the footings of an old building.
“Those are the kind of things that we do not do every year, but when you start to average things out…we continue to have expenses just to keep those buildings so air conditioning, insurance, heating, snowplowing, all of that runs into the tens of thousands or dollars a year,” he said.
To bring in the dollars, Simpson said this campaign will rely on connections and friendships.
“I think a campaign of this nature it is really more done through personal asks,” she said. “We have been going down that road of talking individually and personally and board members are meeting with people who we hope will continue to support us and perhaps in our centennial year maybe even in a bigger way that they have in the past.”
Matteson said the society has also put together a gift guide for those who want to donate.
“We have identified the areas of need that we have and some are small, so for example if somebody wanted to give $50...they can say, ‘I want the 50 to buy X number of preservation boxes’ or whatever,” he said. “A lot of times people like to give, but they like to have it go to a specific thing and we have that gift guide now where people can do that.”
To learn more about the campaign or to donate, visit the Madison Historical Society website at madisonhistory.org.