A committee that has been working for over a year narrowed the options for replacing Andover’s Town Seal to two on Thursday.
Last fall, Andover joined several other Massachusetts towns that have reconsidered Native American imagery on their town seals when the select board appointed a Town Seal Review Committee to reevaluate the seal Andover has used since 1951, collect public input and, if warranted, propose a new seal for town meeting approval. A survey conducted last year drew 1,818 responses that showed people were almost evenly split on whether the town needed to update its seal, which it is required to have under state law.
Moving forward, the committee is scheduling public forums to get input on the two designs for further refinement. The Town Seal Review Committee is eyeing Annual Town Meeting in May to ask voters whether the seal should be replaced and, if so, with which design.
The Old Town Hall Option
While the ultimate decision would come from Annual Town Meeting, committee members signaled they favored the option with Old Town Hall.
“I think [the seal with Old Town Hall] has the best shot of being noticeably representative of Andover,” Town Manager Andrew Flanagan, who sits on the committee, said. “So if it’s a DPW truck going down the street or a police officer wearing it on their shoulder, everyone knows old Town Hall is representative of Andover.”
The Landscape Option
In May, a slim majority of the 418 survey respondents said they preferred an “iconic building” over a “natural subject,” for Andover’s next Town Seal. After considering several designs over the summer, the Town Seal review committee narrowed the potential replacements to two.
“A fairly large group of people were pretty vocal about having something that was represented by water and the landscape basically of the town,” committee member Elaine Clements said. “We shouldn’t ignore that sentiment.”
The Current Seal
Andover’s seal depicts Cutshamache, a Pennacook leader who appeared in court in Boston on May 16, 1646, to acknowledge he had sold the land that became Andover to John Woodbridge for six pounds, a coat and the right for Pennacook people to continue fishing in the area. The image of Cutshamache was adopted when Andover updated its seal in 1899 was based on the design in a pin (above photo) a local jeweler sold for the town’s 250th anniversary in 1896. That first seal was designed by William Foster, who was 13 at the time and went on to become an artist.
Massachusetts has required towns to have a seal since 1899 and the Andover town seal has been changed four times since the first one was adopted in 1855. The town adopted its current seal, which is based on artwork from Andover’s 250th anniversary in 1896, in 1951, according to a history of the seal on the town’s Website.