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Leahy Secures $365,000
For Vermont Historical Society’s New History Center
WASHINGTON (Mon., Nov. 5) –– President Bush Monday
signed into law a funding bill that includes $365,000 secured by Senator
Patrick Leahy for the Vermont Historical Society (VHS). Leahy said the
funds will be used to help renovate the Spaulding Graded School in Barre
as the society’s new home.
Leahy included the provision in the Interior
Appropriations Bill –– which includes the annual budgets for the
Department of the Interior, the U.S. Forest Service, the National
Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, the National Park Service,
which is the source of the VHS funds, and for many other agencies ––
for the new federal fiscal year, which began Oct. 1. Leahy is a senior
member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and of its Interior
Subcommittee, which wrote the Senate’s version of the bill. Leahy
secured another $500,000 for the project last year.
Leahy noted that the abandoned Spaulding School is a
classic illustration of Victorian architecture, one of only three
remaining school buildings designed by the Vermont architect Lambert
Packard. VHS will use this distinctive building to create a
state-of-the-art educational and storage facility for its ever-growing
artifact and archival collections.
Only 5 percent of the society’s collections can be on
public view at any one time in the current location at the Pavilion
Building in Montpelier due to a lack of exhibition space. Two-thirds of
the library and museum collections are housed under sewage and steam pipes
in the basement of a state office building sited in a flood plain. During
the flood of 1992, Vermont legislators and emergency volunteers formed
human chains in an effort to remove irreplaceable artifacts from the
building as raging flood waters threatened to destroy nearly all of the
society’s collections.
The 63,000-square-foot facility planned for the
Spaulding Graded School will provide the space needed to protect the
current collection, allow the society to continue to expand the collection
to better interpret and preserve Vermont’s unique heritage, and ensure
that the resources are available and accessible to the public. The new
facility will add much needed educational and interpretive space as well
as a study gallery, a hands-on history gallery, and a large changing
exhibition area as well as classrooms and an auditorium.
"It is terrific that we are able to use this
heritage building to safeguard our heritage," said Leahy. "I
can’t think of a better place to protect these treasures than the
beautiful old Spaulding School."
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Vermont Contact: Gainor Davis, Executive
Director of the Vermont Historical Society, 828-2291
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