The Lace Collection

While the museum's exhibition past/forward is open to the public, every museum worker, including us volunteer members, has been taking care of their own project.

One of my current projects is organizing information about a collection of lace, and entering it into our digital archive.

The collection is called "The Lillian Rose Perry Collection." 

Ms. Lillian Rose Perry was a woman who lived in Nyack, Rockland County. Through a family member, a large number of her objects were donated to the Orangetown Museum.

The lace collection I have been working on, is a part of her large collection.

Most of the objects are the Victorian style (American Victorian Era: 19th CE). Remnant from the era are still often seen in today's Nyack, where Ms. Perry lived.

To work on this collection, I have been obtaining great help from one of our museum members who is a specialist of lace.

She identifies types of lace, usage and handmade/machine made, by studying each piece from this large collection which contains approximately 400 pieces of works.

This is a time-consuming project, but I have been enjoying these fascinating lace works while organizing them as one of our collections.

Here are some examples...

Some are left as a fragment or a piece.

Strip of ecru filet lace with an interesting botanical pattern

Fragment of filet lace with remnant of cotton fabric attached

Uncompleted triangle piece with whitework embroidery

Long piece of Irish crochet

Some are completed objects which seemed to have been actually used.

White cotton collar with floral embroidery

White cuff with snap buttons and heavy embroidery

Irish crochet baby cap

Ornamental piece

White doily, combination of embroidery and lace work

Decorative pillowcase with full embroidery and elaborate trimming

Some of the pieces from the lace collection have been on view in one of the museum's past exhibitions.

I am sure these beautiful works will also play an important role to talk about the town's rich history in our future exhibition someday again. 

Visitors from the Wild Kingdom

The DePew House, where the Orangetown Museum is holding the exhibition "past/forward," is a historical sandstone building surrounded by woods on two sides.

Due to New York's lovely summer weather, the yard with grass and woods is showing its lusciousness now.

Sometimes,,, we have some wild visitors here.

Squirrels... chipmunks... woodpeckers... cardinals and... 

... turkeys, too!!!

It seems that several turkeys are living in the woods.
They come out to the museum's yard once in a while and look for food.

As long as we do not disturb them, these turkeys are fine with us.
They usually walk around the yard for a while and go back to the woods beyond the bush.

They are the museum's regular visitors now♪

Newsletter "The Orangetown Crier" Summer 2016 Issue Is Out

The Orangetown Historical Museum and Archives releases its seasonal newsletter "The Orangetown Crier" four times a year.

The summer 2016 issue was delivered in the morning on last Friday so, we spent a few hours at the end of the week on preparing and mailing them to the museum's members. 

Using the old-school folding tools, the newsletters were prepared by our hands, and have been mailed on Friday.

They will be reaching the museum's members shortly.

In this issue, "28 heroes" which is playing one of the major contents of the current exhibition past/forward, is spotlighted.

They are the people or groups of people who have achieved significant works on history preservation in this historical town.

The newsletter is available at the museum gallery and on the museum's website.

For the digital issue, please go to the link "The Orangetown Crier" on its homepage.

Summer Boxing Project

Beautiful early summer days are here in Rockland County, NY, too.

When it was still snowing and cold, the museum was busy with preparing the exhibition past/forward.
Now it is no longer a time to long for the blue sky, and the exhibition has been open to the public since early May.
The museum has gained a lot of favorable responses and the exhibition is successfully going on.


Although, the museum is all done with the busy preparation time, museum staff have a lot to do outside the galley.

One of the projects which I have been recently involved with, is called "Summer Boxing Project."
To take care of this project, I went to the Salyer House with another museum staff member this week, bringing some supplies and a big book with the museum collection information with us.

The Salyer House has the museum's storage space, besides its beautiful galleries. A large number of historical objects, which the museum has acquired, are stored there.

What we had to do at the Salyer House's storage was going through the collection and checking if each object was properly stored in the right place (box, shelf, room) in the right way.

On that day, we mainly worked on a few large boxes which consisted of textiles such as women's dresses, jackets, skirts and match-up accessories.

We carefully opened the boxes, removed the textiles and checked the condition including wrapping and tagging.
Some textiles, such as a silk wedding dress and its tulle veil, were extremely fragile... They required extra attention during this project.

After checking the objects one by one, we also had to remember to make a note for all the small information found, so that the information in the digital archive on the computer was also going to be updated properly.

It was very time-consuming work, so that we could not finish many boxes at once.
However, it was also an interesting project for me to join because this is a great chance to see the museum's precious collections which I have never seen yet.

Also, I personally feel that this project reminds me of the monthly inventory day during my managerial career in retail industry.
This collection management "Summer Boxing Project" seems a little more complicated because of the location information, but at the same time, it is more simple because we do not deal with calculating the value based on each price, unlike retail's inventory.

I do not mind continuing working doing similar procedures again and again, as long as I can see that I am making progress and getting closer to having everything make sense.

So,,, I think I can enjoy the project this summer :-)

Even when the museum's exhibition is all set and smoothly running, we have many tasks to do.
There is one more project I have been working on recently. I will talk about that another time♪

Celebration Lunch at the Old '76 House in Tappan

After my school internship with the Orangetown Museum, which was from late January to early May, I fulfilled my experience as an intern at the museum and also graduated from college last month.

It was very very nice and sweet that the museum's curator and the director had planned to take us (another worker who also completed her Master's this Spring, and me) to a celebration lunch one day.

The venue chosen for our feast was one of the most historic places in this historical area, the Old '76 House in Tappan.

I have heard of the restaurant, but it was my first time to go there to eat, so I was very excited about that.


According to the restaurant, it is "New York's oldest tavern" which was built in 1668. The building itself was already fascinating and romantic to me, who grew up in Asia.

In addition to the beauty of the building, the history the restaurant has, makes this place more special.

During the American Revolutionary War, a British Major, John Andre,  was captured and charged with spying, and taken into custody, here, in the restaurant, until the day of his execution.

Major Andre spent his last moment in the building and was put to death by hanging on the hill nearby.


The restaurant is also known as a haunted location.
Fortunately and unfortunately, I have neither seen, heard nor felt any ghost-like substance in my life,,, so I do not think I can tell if it is true.
However, the very pleasant and well-informed servers at the restaurant, would be willing to tell you history of the house and ghost stories as well.

We enjoyed the restaurant's interesting stories over nice meal in the great atmosphere.

It was so nice that I could go to the restaurant for the first time and had a good time with the museum people.

Although my internship schedule is already over, I continue to work as one of the volunteer members of the Orangetown Museum, so I will be updating this blog as well♪

Thank you very much for reading this blog always, and please visit us again!

Summer Look of the DePew House

How was your Memorial Day weekend?

Since last week, it has suddenly become summer-like climate here in Rockland County.

We have been enjoying beautiful, ready-for-BBQ weather recently.

Fresh green nature is now back to the museum, so I spent a little time taking some pictures of the exterior of our DePew House during my volunteer time.

One of the pictures I took, is now on the home page of the museum website and showing our house in the beautiful summer atmosphere. 

Also, we have uploaded 12 selected pictures of the current exhibition past/forward under "EXHIBITS" on the website.

As a part of my volunteer experience, I worked on photographing the museum gallery and preparing pictures as well.
Then, the chosen pictures are shown with caption added by the curator.

Please visit our website and explore history of the museum and the Orangetown.



The museum is open to public on Tesdays (10am - 2pm) and Sundays (1pm - 4pm) at the DePew House.
All the visitors are welcome to the exhibition past/forward with free admission.

Preparing the Salyer House for the Education Program

The current exhibition, past/forward, at the Orangetown Museum, was successfully launched by holding an opening reception last week.

The show is on view on Tuesdays (10am - 2pm) and Sundays (1pm to 4pm) at the DePew House.

Even when the museum is all done with exhibition installation, there are more things to set up for various purposes.

For 3 days in next week, the museum is going to welcome 7th-grade students from South Orangetown Middle School.

The students are visiting the Salyer House on their field trip and the museum's will give them a tour and a history lecture on site.

Prior to this educational program for the students, we worked on setting up the gallery in the house this week.

To enrich the exhibit, we picked a mid-19th CE dress from the museum's collection and added it to the Salyer House's gallery.

This dress is made of cotton fabric with flower prints.
The rich design formed with plenty of fabric and elaborate details, such as a number of pintucks and puffy sleeves, were all created by hand stitches.

The piping work was beautifully done all over the dress as well.
This lovely dress has been well preserved by the donor and the museum's collection management.

We placed the dress with other historical materials in one of the galleries at the Salyer House.

This section of the exhibit is going to give the students an image of the style in a domestic scene in 19th century America.

As it was introduced here before, the Salyer house contains a variety of historical objects acquired from this area.
In addition to the house's Dutch architecture, pieces of furniture, tools, craft works, fine art objects and documents create the atmosphere of the old America.

The Salyer House is not currently open to the public, but it will be next week, only for the students' field trip program.
Everything is installed and ready for it.

The museum is going to welcome the students.
We hope they will enjoy the lecture and take as much as they can from their visit.