Webmaster putting final touches on website
Webmaster Marjorie Power puts the final touches on the new Old Labor Hall website

New Year—New Website—New URL

The Barre Historical Society and the Old Labor Hall have finally unveiled the new website and our new web address oldlaborhall.org. (Please update your bookmark).

A long time in the making (as might be expected for a project created using aged, volunteer, manual labor), the new website is now live. We can now add and up-date content without losing what we already have. The downside of a D-I-Y site is that we are using our friends and visitors (that’s you) as beta testers. We hope you will forgive our mistakes and help us to improve the site by letting us know about any failings you notice (typos, broken links, things that don’t work on your devices or browsers) and functions or content that you would like to see.

Barre Historical Society is working to catch up with the technological acumen of the Old Labor Hall founders.

Caitlin Lovegrove
Caitlin Lovegrove

The founders of the Old Labor Hall employed cutting-edge technology. When the Hall opened in 1900, it was already illuminated with electric lighting. Now the Barre Historical Society is playing catch-up. It has been assisted in its efforts to implement 21st century technology by the Vermont Digital Economy Project of the Council on Rural Development.

Justin McCoart
Justin McCoart

With the assistance of Caitlin Lovegrove and installation prowess of Justin McCoart, the Old Labor Hall was provided with a new more powerful router that provides secure internet access for the Barre Historical Society office and for users of the Hall, in addition to hot-spot access for any passerby as part of the Barre Downtown Wi-Fi Zone. (All these exciting services can be monitored from the comfort of our own homes.)

Rob Fish
Rob Fish

Unfortunately, we learned about the Digital Economy Project just as it was drawing to a close. Nonetheless, Rob Fish, the Project’s Nonprofit Adviser, helped us to take advantage of free hosting at Dreamhost and free advertising and other services from Google for Non-Profits. He used grant money to purchase new software for us and gave us advice on how to implement it.

We hope you enjoy the new features of the site.