As the weather starts to get warmer and spring begins to unfold
it’s time once again for the Natick Historical Society to host school trips
from just about every public school in Natick. These young museum visitors keep
us quite busy and can certainly be quite exciting. Having so many school groups
come to visit is a nice reminder of all the great resources we have here in our
archives related to schools, education and past classes of Natick students.
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| Front Cover of 1925 Sassamon |
We have a large collection of materials related to education,
including graduation programs, schedules of course and classes photos from
various points in Natick’s past. One of the biggest and most useful collections
in our archives is our collection Natick High School Yearbooks. Originally
called “the Sassamon”, the Natick High School Yearbook has been published for
over a hundred years by the Natick High School and serves as an invaluable
resource for anyone visiting our archives to learn more about genealogy or
their family’s history in Natick. Our earliest Sassamon is from the class of
1925 and it’s amazing to see how much the yearbook and Natick have changed
since then. The 1925 Natick High School Sassamon was published in paperback and
contains just over a hundred students, none of whom have pictures to accompany
their entry in the yearbook. Instead, there are a pair of class portraits in
the center of the book where most of the graduating seniors are pictured. For
contrast, the most recently acquired yearbook in our collection, from 2014, was
published in full color and contains over 330 students. Looking at the survey
of these books it’s easy to see the many different ways Natick has changed over
just a short period of time. Changes in fashion and growing populations are all
readily apparent when one looks through a few years’ worth of Natick High
yearbooks. The style changes overtime have produced some really memorable fashion
choices!
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| Doug Flutie's Yearbook Picture |
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| Flutie playing baseball |
It’s possible to even
find a few recognizable faces when flipping through the old copies of our
copies of the Natick yearbook. Perhaps the person most famous we’ve noticed
recently in our yearbook collection is famous quarterback and recent Dancing
with the Stars contestant Doug Flutie. Flutie graduated from Natick High School
in 1981 and already seemed to have started quite an impressive athletic career.
He played both football and baseball and is mentioned in the class history for
having been elected to the High School Hall of Fame for his athletic
achievements.
Though our collection only dates back to 1925 there are
other places to see Natick High School Yearbooks going back even further. The
Morse Institute Library has digital copies of many of the Natick Sassamons
going as far back as the year 1916 that are available to be viewed online here:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Natick+High+School+(Natick%2C+Mass.)--Students--Yearbooks%22.
We are always looking to expand our collection to be better
able to tell the history of Natick, and
filling in some of the gaps in our yearbook collection would be a great way of
doing this. Currently we are only missing twelve copies of the Natick High
School yearbook and would be happy to receive any of them. If someone was
looking to donate their old yearbook from 1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1937, 1939,
1996, 1998, 2003, 2004, 2013 or 2015 we would be very grateful!
