Stories carried by a community
A community’s history lives inside the people who helped shape it.
The finished project is only one part of the legacy. The people and the work that made it possible are part of the story too.
Directed by Ross Burton, the two-day Lanesville Stories project brought together people whose work helped preserve, strengthen, and animate Lanesville and North Gloucester. These were first-person accounts from people who carried community projects forward through volunteer labor, personal donations, historic grants, persistence, and years of stewardship.
A completed project may remain visible while the relationships, setbacks, volunteer hours, contributions, and persistence that made it possible gradually disappear. Recording the presentations allows people who could not attend—and future generations—to hear the stories from those who lived and shaped them.
Watch Lanesville Stories on YouTube →The Lanesville Community Center hosted the meeting. The finished room appeared welcoming, intentional, and beautifully prepared. But creating that environment required weeks of work by the seven-person Lanesville Stories production team. Stored presentation panels were brought out, repaired, painted, and adapted into a temporary exhibition system. The team developed a way to install them in the main room without permanently altering the building. Members contributed their own labor, materials, paint, planning, and money. After the event, the exhibition was carefully dismantled, the room was restored, and the Community Center retained the benefit of the repaired panels and the team’s improvements.
Lanesville Stories was conceived and directed by Ross Burton and produced through the collaborative work of a seven-person team: Christine Currier, Melissa Hobbs, Russell Hobbs, Suzi Natti, Rob Ranta, Les Bartlett, and Ross Burton. Together, the team organized the storytellers, prepared and restored the exhibition panels, designed and installed the presentation environment, contributed materials and labor, produced the two-day event, recorded the presentations, and returned the Community Center room to its original condition afterward.
The audience saw the stories. Behind them was another story—of people quietly doing the work required to make those stories visible. The team did not simply present stories. They built the place in which those stories could be seen and heard.
Ross Burton and Suzi Natti were both born and raised in Lanesville. Suzi’s mother, Lee Natti, was one of the Folly Cove Designers founded by Virginia Lee Burton and also worked as an editor on Virginia Lee Burton’s books. Suzi later carried that creative inheritance into her own work as a children’s-book writer and illustrator. Her brother, Peter Natti, also contributed directly to the Writing Cottage restoration by milling some of the lumber used in the project from locally grown trees.
The restoration of Virginia Lee Burton’s Writing Cottage unfolded across decades. Its visual record follows the project from the careful dismantling of the cottage through the many stages of rebuilding and restoration—a reminder that stewardship is rarely one dramatic act. It is the accumulation of many choices, skills, contributions, and years of care.
Follow the Writing Cottage Restoration →Legacy does not move forward through one person or in one form. It travels through relationships—writing, design, craftsmanship, memory, and the decision to help preserve something that matters.