Happy Birthday NEMA!

It all started 100 years ago, when Delia Isabel Griffin, founding director of the Boston Children’s Museum, gathered a group of colleagues at the Hotel Westminster in the Back Bay to organize a regional conference for people who couldn’t make it to the national meetings of the American Association of Museums. A few months later, the tradition started: the very first “New England Conference,” held at the New England Society of Natural History with 40 attendees.

Thus began the road to today’s NEMA.

Click here to scroll through this commemorative timeline, which highlights milestones in NEMA’s history along with those of the museum field. Picture yourself at one of those early conferences, which were intimate affairs featuring teas, auto tours, and museum people presenting scholarly papers. Imagine what it must have felt like during the dark days of World War Two, when the conference was cancelled because much of our museum family was involved in the war effort. Celebrate the heady 1970s, when NEMA incorporated and hired its first professional staff. (And check out those conference fashions through the years!)

Thanks for celebrating our centennial with us!