White Fund Enlightenment Series

Located in the Louise Haffner Fournier Education Center on NECC’s Lawrence Campus, The White Fund Room is a wonderful space for lectures, readings, and community meetings. The room is adorned with beautiful reproductions of original art owned by The White Fund, with original works housed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

These European and American paintings and watercolors were once owned by the Reverend William E. Wolcott of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Upon Wolcott’s death in 1911, the works of art became the property of the White Fund, a charitable trust. The White Fund placed most of these paintings on deposit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1912; the rest were lent in 1989 and 1994.

View the MFA Boston’s online gallery of the paintings

In 2007, a catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition An Impressionist Legacy: Lawrence’s White Fund Paintings organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy (Andover, MA) and generously supported by The White Fund Inc. Copies are available for viewing at the Lawrence Public Library. 

In the 1850’s Daniel Appleton White served as an Essex County Probate judge and a Massachusetts Congressman. His birthplace was a Methuen farm that would eventually become a part of downtown Lawrence and the campus of Northern Essex Community College. At his direction, money from the sale of a portion of that land would endow a “course of lectures delivered annually designed to enlighten the mind and elevate the character.” His chief concern was “for the advancement and success in life” of the young men and women at work in the textile mills.

The first White Fund lecture was delivered in 1864. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Booker T. Washington were among the mid-century luminaries who graced the White Lecture podium at City Hall on Common Street. Charter trustees Charles S. Storrow, Henry K. Oliver, and Nathanial G. White, for whom the Lawrence Public Library was dedicated, enlisted speakers “tending to the moral and intellectual uplift of the inhabitants of Lawrence.” Today the White Fund Trustees continue this tradition through support of the White Fund Enlightenment Series offered in cooperation with Northern Essex. By Judge White’s design, these presentations are free to the public.