The Melville Academy Museum opens its 104th season on Saturday, July 1.
It is open 2 to 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays in July and August, plus Monday, July 3, and Tuesday, July 4, after the July 4 reading of the Declaration of Independence at the Meetinghouse at noon and the Village Improvement Society’s ice cream social at the Horsesheds.
Park at the 1775 Meetinghouse parking lot on Laban Ainsworth Way off Route 124 and walk to the right down Blackberry Lane to the corner of Thorndike Pond Road. The museum is to the left. Walk up the road to granite stairs or walk to the back window of Melville and take the gradual path to the museum.
Melville Academy Museum exhibits include the bandboxes of Hannah Davis, a 19th-century inventor and entrepreneur who manufactured oval and circular boxes of bent spruce wood, decorated with wallpaper and lined with antique drawings and stories from newspapers of the time. She took the boxes by horse and wagon 50 miles to the mills of Lowell and Manchester to sell them to girls working in the mills.
The museum will offer the following special programs for Jaffrey’s 250th anniversary year.
— July 8: Wall stenciling with Polly Forcier and Vivian Bisbee, working in Moses Eaton’s style.
— July 15: Mural-painting with Lisa Curry Mair, works in a modernized Rufus Porter style.
— July 22: Pianist Virginia Eskin will play Amy Beach, Florence Price, Scott Joplin and others.
— Aug. 5: Buddy the pony is on the lawn for children to learn about ponies.
— Aug. 6: Children’s old-fashioned games on the lawn.