The History Center’s Year in Review

book cover Gary Reinbolt, Director, The History Center in Tompkins County Delivered at the Annual Meeting, Dec. 4th, 2008.

The History Center has had an eventful year, full of variety in terms of programming and other educational activities, with several key events, which have created a benchmark for us in our future activities.

Education:

The Eight Square Schoolhouse The Eight Square Schoolhouse Living History program, one of nine programs within the Discovery Trail’s Kids Discover the Trail program, generated the highest marks for satisfaction of all the programs, and served a record number of students this year. The Eight Square program is not just fun, it helps teachers in the Ithaca City School District meet an important Regent’s mandate for the fourth grade, which is to spend a day in the past. Teachers in other districts, who don’t have this resource available to them, must re-create a historic classroom within their own classrooms. The History Center provides a full day full immersion experience, which we understand, anecdotally, is the most talked about field trip of the student’s elementary career. The History Center is in the primary planning stages of a restoration of the Eight Square, which I am certain you will be hearing more about in the coming year.
After a hiatus of over a year, the Student Historian program is currently serving its second class in this calendar year, teaching high school students the art, craft and science of history by using source documents and being mentored by history and museum professionals here at the Center.
In partnership with Ithaca College, The History Center again hosted IC‘s environmental history class, allowing students to use the resources of the archives here at the History Center to learn about the widely divergent views of what the word “environment” means during various periods in history.
History Center again served elementary classrooms with its Tools Of History program, which sends out duplicate artifacts from our collections to classrooms for teachers to use in illustrating history concepts, and hosted a number of elementary school classes here at the center to help bring history to life for second and third graders.

Collections:

The History Center revitalized its exhibits program kicking off with Lois and Marion: A Literary And Visual Legacy. This exhibit focused on two prominent women in Ithaca affairs, a photographer and a writer, who managed to compete in male-dominated fields while maintaining a close personal relationship in an era where gender issues were kept well hidden. An accompanying book club and film series expanded on the issues raised by these materials from our archives. A concurrent exhibit, In The Home: Women In Tompkins County in Mid 20th Century provided interesting counterpoint to the main exhibit.
Commencing in the fall, we launched our year-long transportation theme for exhibits beginning with On The Road, followed by the exhibit you see around you now, Riding the Rails. Riding the Rails is a wonderful product of a partnership between the Cornell Railroad club and The History Center, allowing us to mount this exhibit at a very high quality and low cost due to the expertise of passionate amateurs who lent a hand producing this exhibit.

Outreach:

In an effort to make history more accessible, and present it in a novel way, The History Center launched two initiatives: The History Cafe, a lecture series in an informal setting dealing with topics not traditionally presented by historians. For the inaugural presentation, titled Hallelujah We’re Bad, 70 participants joined us, the majority of them for the first time, and the lecture was taped and broadcast on Time Warner’s Pegasys channel for a much wider audience. Secondly, The Haunted History Tour, the brainchild of a volunteer researcher and our Marketing and Development Manager was presented to great acclaim, serving over 400 individuals in the fall with a walking tour highlighting Ithaca’s history from an unusual point of view, the famous and infamous who died untimely deaths here in our community. By the way, this Saturday The History Center will continue its outreach to new communities by hosting a family day, in conjunction with the model Railroad Association in Tompkins County, for a day of model trains, fun, and closely supervised juvenile mayhem. It is hoped that these activities will introduce new friends to The History Center and encourage them to come back for more.
The History Center has made a commitment to using the tools of history to shine light on current events. The most outstanding example of that was a three-part series entitled Achieving Equity: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, and Where We Can Go. Presented by Barry Derfel and Sean Eversley Bradwell, this examined the antecedents of the race problem at Ithaca High School, and brought together the community to generate ideas for solutions moving forward. By the way, we are planning a follow-up to that series in the coming year with Sean and Barry.
Two presentations were made during this extremely political year dealing with politics in Tompkins County, one entitled From Alf Landon To Barack Obama, Ithaca Votes For President In 2008 examining the migration of Tompkins County from a solidly Republican bastion during the Roosevelt years to its current incarnation as a Democratic stronghold. The second, an address by Barbara Blanchard discussing women in local politics, talked about her experiences as a pioneer in the days when women in politics were a curiosity rather than a force to be reckoned with.
In another example of a wonderful partnership, the Tompkins County Quilters Guild is currently inspecting our entire 110-piece collection, which has not been opened in many years. They are taking digital photographs, building a digital index, and repacking them in state-of-the-art storage. We would not be able to undertake this important review of one of our larger collections without the help of the guild. By the way, at the conclusion of this activity, The History Center will mount a quilt exhibition slated to begin a year from this January. See Focus on Quilting.

Archives:

The History Center was pleased to be able to partner with the Southside Community Center in creating an exhibit celebrating the life of James L. Gibbs, a central figure in Ithaca during the civil rights years, who left a lasting legacy in the form of many institutions, which still serve the interests of community harmony.
The History Center was featured in an episode of PBS’s “History Detectives” in an article about an Ithaca woman who was the suspected author of a book on Mormons. Donna Eschenbrenner and Mary White helped the producers and researchers gather the facts of the story, and the resulting feature was, of course, to PBS’s sterling standards due in no small part to The History Center.

I would be remiss in not thanking the staff of The History Center, all of whom are dedicated professionals who do a remarkable job in providing the citizens of Tompkins County with access to their forefathers legacy, and who produce exhibits and programs which are remarkable for both their quality and their variety. Donna Eschenbrenner, Archivist, Carol West, the Eight Square Schoolhouse Coordinator, Shannon Lindridge, Collections & Exhibits, Paul Miller, Adult Education & Public Programs, Mary White, Research & Library Services, Carl Koski, who runs the darkroom and provides the support on the physical plant, Agata Okulicz-Kozarin, Administrative Support & Visitor Services, and Wylie Schwartz, Marketing and Development Manager and the expediter of the Haunted History Tours.

Finally, I would like to recognize the vital role that our volunteers play in moving The History Center forward. We deal with many volunteers over the course of the year, whose involvement ranges from casual associations to the truly dedicated core of quasi-professionals who help us identify and index photographs, maintain the integrity of our collections, help us serve researchers in the library, create scrapbooks and other materials which form part of the archive itself, and a myriad of other tasks which helps to elevate this institution to a level of quality far beyond its meager means can afford.