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I had been in Pennsylvania, taking a few days off after Town Meeting, when the news broke. As I eased my way back into the saddle on Monday, a friend at Starbucks told me Lauren McCormack would be leaving the Marblehead Museum.
The first thing I thought about was a hole in the ground.
The day a 140-year-old fire cistern was uncovered beneath the Park on Elm Street, I drove straight to the Marblehead Museum with Cody, my Yorkie-Maltese, in the passenger seat. I didn't have an appointment. I almost never did.
Before I left Elm Street, where I had gone to survey the hole, I sent her a text with a photo — the stacked granite blocks forming a ring and a dark cavity. She started searching before I'd put the car in drive.
Lauren met me on the first floor of the Marblehead Museum's headquarters at 170 Washington St. On her computer screen were the Sanborn maps — the ones the fire-insurance company published of Marblehead in the 1880s and 1890s, every house numbered, every cistern marked, every wood-frame and brick wall coded in pink and yellow — and she was tracing the Back Street neighborhood before I sat down next to her. Cody settled at her feet like he'd been doing it for years.
She said: here is the block. Here is the cistern. Here is what was around it. Here is who lived there. Here is why the town built it where they did, and here is the year the water mains came in and made it obsolete. I wrote down everything she said, and most of what ended up in my piece came out of that hour at her screen.
There are numerous examples of these types of interactions with Lauren, but I marveled over how quickly she found the answer that day, because that kind of help doesn't show up in any annual report. A town often only notices it when it's gone.
That hour was not unusual. It was the job, the way she did it. "We've really become a community resource," she told me when we spoke recently by phone about her departure. "People know they can come to the museum for help with their house histories, their genealogy, but also as a place to hold events, as a place to turn to for guidance and leadership in anything history related in town." She said it plainly, the way she says most things, and the way she said it made clear she did not think it was a small accomplishment. It is not.
Lauren is, more than anything else, a can-do person, and I cannot think of a nonprofit or civic effort in this town she did not somehow find a way to help. Pumpkin Illumination at the Lee Mansion Garden. The interpretive sidewalk panels that went up around town in 2023 and 2024 — the Naumkeag panel at Ocean Avenue, the Negro Burying Place panel at 45 Elm St., the Joseph and Lucretia Brown panel at the Joseph Brown Conservation Area, the panel about the ship Desire at Hammond Park. The Marblehead 250 Committee. The collaborations with Marblehead Public Schools, the Marblehead Racial Justice Team, the Marblehead Historical Commission, Discover Marblehead, the Garden Club and the Arts Association. If somebody in Marblehead was trying to do something that touched the town's history, however tangentially, she found the time. The Racial Justice Team gave her the inaugural Drum Major for Justice Award in 2024 for the part of this work that drew the most quiet courage out of her — the research on the town's Black and Indigenous history, the database and the slow excavation of names the town had let go.
She did it all with a staff of essentially two and a legion of volunteers. "There's literally two of us trying to do this work," she told me once when I worked at the Marblehead Current, after a federal grant for the Brick Kitchen archaeology had been rescinded, she said, and she was trying to figure out how to keep the project moving. She kept the project moving. The Brick Kitchen and Slave Quarters at 157 Washington St., across the street from the Frost Gallery, opens to the public on June 1 — a $1.4 million restoration of one of only three surviving detached slave quarters owned by a museum in New England. The inaugural exhibit is called "Resistance and Resilience: Slavery and Freedom in Marblehead."
Twenty-nine days after the ribbon is cut, she will leave.
Every long-serving director of the Marblehead Museum seems to leave behind a completed capital project. Pam Peterson, who hired her in 2016, left the Frost Gallery — on the second floor of the building that Cody and I walked into when we looked over the Sanborn maps. Lauren leaves the Brick Kitchen across the street, and the names inside it. The two buildings are about 60 feet apart and they tell two different stories about what a town wants its museum to be.
She is leaving because the commute from her home in central Massachusetts — roughly three hours a day, four days a week, for five years — finally got the better of her body. The new job at Freedom's Way National Heritage Area, a federally designated 45-community region in north-central Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, is closer to home and larger in scope. She is not going far. "I'm not going away," she told me. "I will do anything I can to help with the transition, and I'll find my way to Marblehead probably a couple times a year."
I believe her.
I'll keep thinking about that hour with her, Cody and the Sanborn maps now that she's leaving – how impressed I was. The cistern is closed. The Sanborn maps are still on the museum's computer. Somebody else will sit at that screen – on the second floor of the remodeled Brick Kitchen – and pull them up for some reporter who walks in without an appointment, with a dog in tow and a deadline.
But it won't be Lauren.
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