Welcome to the home page of the
Pittsfield · Somerset County
Maine · U.S.A.

"Retrospection is profitable. A study of the past
may lead to improvements in the future."
—'Juniper' in Pittsfield's The Advertiser, December 30, 1886.

Save the Depot!

The Pittsfield Historical Society and the Town of Pittsfield are in need of your help to save our Historic Depot. The Depot is sorely in need of major repairs and renovation, while maintaining its historic character. Checks can be sent to Town of Pittsfield, c/o Save Our Historic Depot Campaign, 112 Somerset Ave., Pittsfield ME 04967. Please click on the letter at the right to learn more.

PHS & its Members

The Pittsfield Historical Society was formed in 1983 in a community effort to preserve and protect some of the town's most valuable assets: its history and artifacts. Pittsfield's past is rich in the history of a mill town, beginning in its earliest days as a wilderness hunting expedition site, to the first mills erected on the Sebasticook River that winds its way through the downtown area.

Members of PHS are local people with a common interest: Pittsfield!

Some members offer a significant and substantial offering to our history; others quietly affect the background musings. We listen to others' impossible dreams, (and create a few of our own), lend a hand with repairs, unravel mysteries, research genealogy, catalog artifacts and pictures, and unobtrusively capture the essence of a part of our New England heritage. Whatever your capability, your interest is the key.

Help us write the history of Pittsfield!

This site is constantly growing. In these pages you will find several locations listed with little or no history given. If you know even parts of the history of these locations, please share with us what you know so we can better fill in the history of Pittsfield. Also see the History of Your Place page.

Join the Society

Hoping to preserve the way we were, PHS collects bits and pieces of Pittsfield history largely through donated artifacts, photographs, newspapers, family scrapbooks and diaries. By looking at and preserving the way it was, we aspire to keep the spirit of many alive. The local community is wealthy in history scarcely uncovered of a small frontier town, to bustling mill town to the safe, clean New England town we know today.

 

Members of PHS invite you to join us in piecing together the alluring portrait of Pittsfield, Maine, USA. Call one of the contacts listed below or join us as we meet at the Depot House Museum on Central Street. The public is always welcome to join us. Watch the Rolling Thunder Express community paper for our notice!

Would you like to get occasional email notices from the PHS?

From time to time the society will be sending email notices to anyone interested in Pittsfield Historical Society events. If you would like to be recieve these notices click here to write an email to send us your email address. We won't share your address with anyone else.

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Museum Hours:
April to October: The Depot House Museum will be open every Tuesday and Saturday, from 10am to 1pm., or by appointment.
November - March: The Depot House Museum will be open by appointment. Contact Tom Brown (487-4926).

If you would like to visit the Museum during other hours, call or email Tom Brown (487-4926)

Meetings of the Pittsfield Historical Society:
January through October meetings will be at 7 pm on the third Thursday of each month at the Museum.

Please visit soon!

Click here to learn more about the Pittsfield Historical Society.

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Contact Information

Pittsfield Historical Society   www.pittsfieldhistoricalsociety.org
Location: Pittsfield Historical Society, 114 Central Street, Pittsfield
Phone: (207) 487-4926 (Tom Brown)
Mailing Address: P.O. Box 181, Pittsfield, Maine 04967
GPS: LAT 44.782; LONG: -69.383

Breanna Norris, President & Curator   pittsfieldhistoricalsociety@gmail.com

Jim Lanzikos, Vice President, JLanzikos@gmail.com

Alvah Wyman, Treasurer   alnmil@roadrunner.com

Tom Roberts, Webweaver   tom@snakeroot.net

A note about requesting geneological information:
There are no trained or experienced genealogists in the society, so callers should not expect too much. Most of what we do have can be found by searching this web site.

The minimum information needed for us to do anything useful:
1) Full name of the person being researched, including maiden name for a married woman;
2) Dates—birth date, marriage date, and death date if known; or at least a general period such as “1850s” or “early 1900s;”
3) Connection to Pittsfield such as: worked here, owned a farm or business here, attended school here, or was married in a church here, or was buried here but lived somewhere else;
4) Provide requester's name and an e-mail address or, if telephone only, when is the best time to call.

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• Many of the images may be clicked on to view a larger version.
• Photo - High quality image scanned from an actual photograph; or an original digital photograph.
• Postcard - Slightly lower quality image than a photograph, as postcards were printed copies of photographs, sometimes colorized.
• Newspaper Photo - Grainy, lower quality picture visibly made up of dots, scanned from the Historical Society's newspaper collection.
• A few of the files on this website are in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). In order to view those PDF files, you will need to have a PDF reader program (may already be on your computer) such as APDF, XPDF or Adobe Reader. They are all free.
• The Society is always looking for old photographs of Pittsfield, which we will either place in the Museum or scan and return to the owner.
• Many street names mentioned throughout Pittsfield's history were eliminated during the Emergency 9-1-1 street name reorganization that took effect in 2007. Details can be found here.
• To find a word on any page, type Ctrl-F in your browser, then type the word you want to find.
• Links that will send you to another website are marked with a .

Pictured above in Historical Society photo taken outside the Depot Museum, September 2004:
(L-R) Treasurer Melissa Flewelling, Eric Flewelling, Historian Don Hallenbeck, President Jim Lanzikos, Webweaver Tom Roberts, Clum Spencer, Secretary Tom Brown, and Curator Kathy Palmer. Photo by Thomas Hopkins Photography.