Melville Academy Museum
Current Exhibitions
Over a century, generous donations from members of the community have created a local history museum that contains many treasures.
Melville Academy Museum has an excellent collection of Hannah Davis Bandboxes, scrapbooks documenting VIS activities, 19th century kitchen and agricultural tools including Amos Fortune’s handmade pitchfork, samplers made by young local girls in the early 19th century, the old mail boxes of the Jaffrey Center Post Office (which closed in 1991), dresses worn by Jaffrey women, and other artifacts relating to life in Jaffrey Center in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, and the people who have dwelled and worked here.
The museum’s second floor has been maintained as a schoolroom, with historical information on Melville Academy. The Academy opened its doors in 1833 and later served as a public school. The school was closed in 1920.
The focus of the Museum’s collection and the arrangement of its contents are both historical and thematic. Its contents, with a few exceptions, are valuable either as sentimental objects with meaning to people who are still alive and remember some aspect of their provenance, or as teaching examples of life in Jaffrey Center from the early 19th century to the present. The museum’s collection includes over 600 catalogued articles.
Exhibit: Five Famous Jaffrey People
A special museum exhibit honors five prominent people of Jaffrey: Amos Fortune, a slave who became a tanner, earned his freedom and helped found the first library in Jaffrey; his friend, the Rev. Laban Ainsworth, who served the First Church in Jaffrey for 76 years and was superintendent of schools; Hannah Davis, one of the first women inventors and entrepreneurs who made and sold artful luggage known as bandboxes; Jonas Melville, a banker and benefactor who financed the first high school and two church buildings in Jaffrey; and Willa Cather, author of many early 20th century novels, some of which she wrote while staying in Jaffrey. See the special display of photos and artifacts about these five noted people
This exhibit in the northwest corner of the museum’s first floor focuses attention on the five people most often associated with Jaffrey Center.
Exhibit: “Willa Cather’ Spirit Lives On!”
The Cather exhibit includes the only published photo, to date, of Cather together with Edith Lewis, her partner. The photo of them was taken in 1926 on the Jaffrey Meetinghouse Common with Cather sitting on a Village Improvement Society bench. Cather chose to be buried in Jaffrey rather than in Nebraska, where she grew up. Lewis is buried next to Cather a thousand feet from the museum in the SW corner of the Old Burying Ground behind the 1775 Meetinghouse. The exhibit includes many of her books; her published letters; the room number from the Shattuck Inn where she stayed while writing novels; a first-day issue sheet of Willa Cather postage stamps; many magazine articles about her; and the program and map of a national conference held in 2018 in Jaffrey, “Willa Cather’s Spirit Lives On!”
Photo restored for Melville Academy Museum by Inkberry, Marlborough, NH. Photo Credit: Mrs. Josiah Wheelwright. From Theodore Jones, “Willa Cather in the Northeast (A Pictorial Biography) 1917- 1947.” UNB Masters Thesis, 1968. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick, Canada.
Exhibit: Jaffrey Center Post Office
Next is the old Jaffrey Center Post Office boxes, on loan from Noel and Stephen Pierce since 2001. Mrs. Meyers, Postmistress 1941 to 1974, greets you from behind the P.O. window. These P.O. Boxes were the actual ones in use at 371 Main Street between 1921 and 1974, when the Post Office moved to the Oribe Barn across Main Street, and again from 1979 to 1990 when the P.O. returned to 371 Main Street. It is said that when Mrs. Meyers saw you coming, she would get your mail and hand it to you. People remember that she handed out candy to the children. On the side of the boxes there is a list box numbers and names of the people who rented them. In 1990, the Jaffrey Center Post Office was permanently closed. Eventually, the Post Office boxes were moved to the museum.
Exhibit: Hannah Davis Bandboxes
The award-winning collection of famous Hannah Davis Bandboxes (19th c. boxes and suitcases) can be seen on shelves between the EAST windows. Hannah Davis (1784-1863) needed to make a living at age 34 after her widowed mother died. She became an inventor and entrepreneur who manufactured and sold beautiful “bandboxes” – luggage or hat boxes– made of bands of thin spruce veneers that were bent to make oval shaped boxes finished with tops and bottoms made from pine. The boxes and tops were then covered with colorful wall papers and lined with newspapers. Hannah invented a machine that enabled strong men to slice the thin bands of the spruce, and she transported and sold the boxes to girls working in mills in Manchester, NH and Lowell, Mass. Large boxes were used as suitcases to carry belongings.
Antique Clothing and linens hanging below the bandboxes, and items on the table opposite the bandboxes, might have been packed in a Hannah Davis bandbox. Luggage trunks used on stagecoaches and trains are below on the floor.
Exhibit: The 1841 Schoolroom
The original 19th century schoolroom of Melville Academy has been preserved on the second floor. It has historical information on Melville Academy, books, toys, art, old maps, and artifacts. The Academy opened its doors in 1833 as Jaffrey’s first (and private) high school. In 1835 87 boys and 87 girls from New England and New York state attended the school. They boarded with local residents. The second-floor exhibit is known as the 1841 Schoolroom because it has the list of pupils from that year, ancestors of current Jaffrey families. The 1841 Schoolroom has 28 original mortise-and-tenon bench and desk units, built without nails and fixed into the floor. Two or possibly three teen-agers sat next to each other. The names of the Melville students, listed in the 1841 catalogue displayed on the front (south) wall, include many members of the Cutter family. Miss Sarah Cutter was the assistant teacher. Her dress adorns the mannequin by the teacher’s desk.
How it began.
In 1919 the VIS was given permission by the Town to use and restore Melville Academy and turn it into a local history museum on the provision that it be open at least one day a year for town’s people to visit. The VIS opened the museum with a grand ceremony on August 4, 1920.