The New England Carousel Museum was founded as a nonprofit educational organization in 1990, in Bristol, Connecticut. At that time, the Carousel Museum rented 10,000 square feet of space on the first floor of the restored 33,000 sq. ft. factory building at 95 Riverside Avenue, and displayed a diverse collection of carousel art and memorabilia.

In 1990, the Museum established a Board of Directors, which applied for and obtained non-profit status. A full-time museum professional was hired as the Executive Director on August 1, 1991. In the beginning, the Museum concentrated on creating an educational entity which presented the art and history of the carousel, and informed the general public on preserving this valuable yet vanishing piece of Americana. At that time the staff was restructured to create a department of public education, an exhibition development team, a public relations function, a procedure for operations, a structure for volunteer involvement, a membership structure, a long-term loan agreement, a collection management policy, an archives, and a need to begin serious research on the collection pieces and the subject matter.

Although called a "museum" when first opened, in reality, an "attraction" was launched. An "oh! ah!" atmosphere was created, but there were no structured education programs or exhibition materials accompanying the pieces. Immediate energy went into the research necessary to create educational programs, temporary exhibitions and special events. These activities would create the necessary press to bring people of all ages to visit and revisit the Museum, while generating income for general operation. Educational programs were launched that were accurate, informative and fun. Grant funding was obtained that allowed the project team to research, develop, design, and implement new exhibition material giving the visitors, for the first time, a choice of how they learned about the subject matter. Wonderful theme parties were produced as fundraisers for the Museum, but more importantly, it gave the community a new look at the Museum. We started paying attention to our visitors, and through informal evaluation, we started finding out who they were and where they came from, why they came, and what they liked and didn't like about their Museum experience. Today, with the use of a retail software program, visitor zip-codes are collected, which gives us information about who is visiting us and where they are from.

The Museum has matured considerably over the past 16 years, and it continues to grow and evolve. We have been through many growing pains, all of them helping us to achieve independence, maturity, and some of our goals. There have been major improvements in many areas, including the expansion of the Museum collection thanks to a $100,000.00 grant for collection acquisition from the State of Connecticut. We have created a restoration department that allows opportunities for artisans, carvers, painters and restorers to work with the Museum on a regular basis to restore antique pieces, create new carousel pieces and demonstrate the art of the carousel. This department helps to generate income for the general operation of the Museum. In addition to individual pieces brought in for restoration, we have three contracts in our shop to restore municipal carousels, including the Looff ride from East Providence, the PTC carousel from Holyoke MA, and the Bushnell Park Carousel in Hartford. We have elected individuals of national reputation to our Board of Directors who advise us in the area of collection expansion and will help to guide us through our next phase of growth. This year we are concentrating on Board development, orientation and the creation of a new strategic plan for our organization. We received a grant from the Connecticut Humanities Council that allowed us to research, write and produce a historic collections manual. We have developed new educational programs in order to broaden our educational menu, and we have continued to receive high praise on our existing programs. Our goal is to maintain the excellence created in our existing programming while developing new experiences for our visitors. We have recently developed a new education committee to help us design new programs that coincide with the school¹s curriculum. This should help us bring in more school groups to the Museum.

The New England Carousel Museum received the contract from the City of Hartford, in April, 1999, to manage and run the historic Bushnell Park Carousel. They renewed our contract in May, 2002 for another three years and again in 2005 for another 5 years. This spectacular carousel, created in1914 by Solomon Stein and Harry Goldstein has 48 horses, 2 chariots and a wonderful Wurlitzer Band Organ. The Carousel turns 92 years old this year. Having the responsibility for this million dollar historic antique wooden carousel is a thrill and has allowed us to further fulfill our Museum mission, "to preserve and protect antique wooden carousels and carousel pieces." Each year we have given away 23,000 free ride tickets to the children of Hartford through the public school system. Our focus over the past few years has been on obtaining the funding to restore the Carousel. We ran an Adopt-A-Horse campaign and a Pennies for Ponies campaign in the public schools to help raise the funds for the restoration. We refurbished the platform in 2003, repainted and gold leafed the Carousel structure in 2004 and began restoring the horses in 2005. We have developed a Countdown to 100 program, which gives the Carousel a birthday each year leading up to the 100th milestone. A major celebration will then be held.

In December of 1998, the State of Connecticut granted the New England Carousel Museum $250,000.00 to create a permanent home for the Museum in Bristol and for the creation of the Cultural Center for Central Connecticut. Of that amount, $200,000.00 was used toward the $300,000.00 purchase price of the building coupled with a $100,000.00 donation from the Roberts Foundation. The $50,000.00 additional funding from the State was used to begin capital improvements to the building. The purchase of the building not only gave the organization a permanent home but it also gave us the opportunity to grow and expand out educational offerings and create more community events.

As we evolved, The New England Carousel Museum has concentrated on turning the building at 95 Riverside Avenue into The Bristol Center for Arts & Culture. In November 2000, we expanded the Carousel Museum experience on the first floor of the building by adding three new galleries: one exhibition on the History of the Carousel, and two fine art galleries. Glo Sessions, a local artist of international reputation, allowed us to create a new show of her work entitled, Bristol 2000: A Retrospective, to launch the new fine art galleries in the Cultural Center. Since that time we have had the opportunity of exhibiting over 40 art shows in the temporary gallery space that include fine art, folk art, photography, wood carving as well as other mediums. Once completed, we turned our attention to developing the second floor of the building.

The Museum of Fire History opened to the public on the second floor of the building in June, 2002. Carlyle Barnes donated his fire equipment and memorabilia collection as well as funding to create this new splendid museum. The opening of the Fire Museum was accompanied by rave reviews. Funding has been approved by the State of Connecticut for a new Museum of Greek Art and History that will also be located on the second floor. The funding has arrived, the preliminary design has been done and we are waiting on the Greek Committee to decide on what direction they will take. The construction of the Museum restoration department was completed last year and has been in full production, helping to generate income for the Museum. The second floor also houses the studio of our master carver, Juan Andreu and the Bushnell Park Carousel office, which we manage. We also completed the new second floor entrance that includes special needs accessible restrooms and a special needs ramp to the second floor.

The unique aspect of the second floor is the major uncommitted floor space which we intend to keep open for all to use. We are creating a new multipurpose gallery space that will allow the organizations and artists the opportunity to extend their offerings by overflowing into the gallery to present additional programs and temporary exhibitions. With the many improvements we have made to the building, we now have many facility rentals at the Museum, including wedding, bar mitzvahs, dinners and performances. We also use the space to run classes and events. All of these activities help to generate income for the Museum. We had $15,000.00 worth of chandeliers donated to the Museum. Now installed on the second floor, the lighting has turned the area into a majestic facility rental hall.

Four additional projects have been completed this past year. Our new passenger elevator is finished making our building totally accessible to our special needs visitors. We have refinished the wooden floors on the second floor of the building and renovated our stairwell hanging a magnificent donated crystal chandelier lighting the way. The Museum of Greek Culture structure is completed and work has begun on creating the exhibits. All of this work has helped to create a spectacular entrance to the banquet room on the second floor.

We plan to focus our attention on three new projects for this coming year. We plan to begin writing grants to obtain funds for the repair of the main part of the roof and for the installation of a new air handling system that will modernize the heating system and allow for air conditioning. The new system will better control the building temperature and will create a better atmosphere for the collections. It will also be more cost effective. We should also see a dramatic increase in our attendance during the summer months. A new air handling system will also extend the length of our facility rental season creating more income for the Museum. Our third project is to find the funding to bring home a working carousel that is in storage in Florida that was donated to the Museum a few years ago. Getting the carousel to Bristol and up and operational in our building will be a major drawing card and should help increase our attendance numbers.