At her kitchen table on a rainy Saturday morning in late October, Pat Cutter recalls, “We got tired of watching kids at the beach [on Buzzard’s Bay, where they then lived], so Bill and I started looking for something in New Hampshire. We weren’t looking for a specific town, but since we were spending that weekend with friends in Sutton, we did a drive-by of a house in Andover on a rainy Saturday, returned for a walk-through the next day, a sunny Sunday, and bought it on Monday.”
Pat still lives in the house she and Bill bought and fixed up. It was formerly owned by Bob Ward, and built, she thinks, around the turn of the last century, 1900 to 1910 or so. After living there part time for a few years while they fixed it up and sold their Massachusetts place, Pat and Bill moved to Andover permanently in 1987.
Pat’s first acquaintance with the Andover Historical Society (AHS) was through the auction, which back then was held in the middle of town. She was invited by Dot and Les Ford to attend an AHS meeting at their home. She became a member and ever since has made the Historical Society her life’s work.
She kicked off her tenure by being charged with overseeing the children’s games and the vendors at the annual AHS Fair and over the years ended up overseeing every detail of the Fair, from tents to music to games to the auction to the flea market — a driving force from the get-go, over the years becoming the driving force. Pat has served as president of AHS from 2007 to 2016. Prior to that, she served as president from 1996 to 1998, the traditional two-year term. Pat has been willing to defer to the trustees and continue as president.
She considers her biggest hurdle and achievement the acquisition of “the damn freight car. We needed storage.” Pat was tipped off to the whereabouts of the freight car by Tom Miller, who houses his own caboose in Northfield. At the time, the freight car was sitting on the track along Storrs Street in Concord, serving as a billboard for the Granite Plumbing and Heating Company.
She approached the appropriate person in Concord, and after surveying the freight car – “kind of a hobo jungle,” she said, “being enjoyed by all sorts of people for eating and sleeping” – Pat made an offer to the right person, who said he could haul it to a side-track in Canterbury. Pat arranged to have it transported by train. It arrived in Canterbury on a snowing December day in 2007, pulled by a huge engine.
Unhitched, it sat on the Canterbury siding until June 2009, when it was transported by truck to Potter Place, where it now resides alongside the freight shed. Since then, it has been repainted to its original blue and the B&M lettering restored, painstakingly orchestrated by Pat with the unending support and help of Arch Weathers. Not only does the freight car provide storage, but it also adds a wonderful ambiance to the village and its railroad history.
An added note: there is a DVD originally made for Andover’s cable TV channels, filmed by Tina Cotton and narrated by Pat, which documents every stage of this Herculean enterprise. It is archived at the Historical Society and well worth seeing!
The greatest challenge to the Historical Society at this point, Pat says, is getting younger people involved. She applauds the recent selection of Jesse Schust as the next AHS president; she feels the organization is leaning in the right direction headed by a younger person “with fresh insights.” Her dream is to someday have the freight shed become a museum for larger archival holdings like farm equipment and machinery.
Now, having served as President for 12 years of her 30-year tenure with AHS, she has chosen to retire. Despite her retirement, she assures the Board she will be there as always to run the Fair. But how hugely she will be missed! Her direct style, her fun and short meetings, her ability to cut-to-the-chase and always, always take up the slack when it came to anything that needed doing.