ITHACA NY –The History Center in Tompkins County announces their next major exhibit ‘Knot Sew Fast: Patchwork of Tompkins County’, to open on February 3rd 2023 at their Exhibit Hall on the Ithaca Commons. Knot Sew Fast pulls from the extensive textile and fabric arts collections held by The History Center to lay out the stories these functional artworks tell about Tompkins County history.

Piecing together the story of quilts encourages us to consider shifts in technology, industry, transportation, and materials over generations of local life. As we unravel (figuratively) each quilt we consider the hands that did the work, and the stories they captured in every knot and stitch. In addition to historic quilts displayed from four of the nine townships of Tompkins, there will be interactive patternmaking stations in the Exhibit Hall; an invitation for our modern audience to try their hand at replicating patterns from ancestral woven Haudenosaunee belts to modern-day art quilts.

Quilts are a unique measure to explore history as the practice of quilting was a skill developed and practiced equally by historic Ithacan city-dwellers, as well as our rural township communities of Trumansburg, Groton, Dryden, Lansing, Caroline, Newfield, and Danby. The merging of this functional skill, and the hundreds of hours and handwork displayed in each quilt shares narratives about community, history, home, and skilled labor.

Knot Sew Fast will encourage a slower recognition of the diversity of textiles and patterns, as well as the hands and minds that created them. The exhibit will be on display from February 3rd 2023 through mid-August 2023. Follow @TompkinsHistory and http:// thehistorycenter.net/knot-sew-fast for updates.

About The History Center: The History Center in Tompkins County is a generation-to-generation education and research center focused on engaging the public with the history of Tompkins County (located in the ancestral and contemporary lands of the Gayogo̱hó:nǫ' Nation) and the Finger Lakes region. The History Center helps people use the tools of history to understand the past, gain perspective on the present, and play an informed role in shaping the future. The History Center is located within the Tompkins Center for History & Culture. Learn more at thehistorycenter.netand follow @TompkinsHistory on any platform.

###

Learn more at thehistorycenter.net/Filipino-History

Tompkins County's first recorded residents of Asian descent date to the mid 1800's. Records for the City of Ithaca show small but increasing populations from Asian, Asian-Indian, and Pacific Islander (AAPI) nations from the 1890's into the twentieth century, although multi-generation AAPI immigrant families did not appear consistently until after the 1930's. These records can be explored at historyforge.net, please note that a category for "Filipino" was not in the U.S. Census until 1920. 

Filipino students were attending Cornell University as early as the 19-teens. A 2021 article found that Cornell's third president Jacob Gould Schurman (President from 1892-1920) supported American imperialist control of the Philippines. Editorials published in the Ithaca Journal during the 1920's by Filipino students enrolled at Cornell demonstrate pushback against the paternalistic and imperialist views promoted by university staff and America at-large during the period.

Beginning in the 1970s, the Asian immigrant population of Tompkins County began to grow more expansively, with more people arriving from the Indian subcontinent as well as from Southeast Asian countries, especially Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia; learn more at thehistorycenter.net/AAPI-Heritage-Month. 

Tompkins County's most notable Filipino-American resident of the last century is undoubtedly Florence Finch. Florence was awarded the Asiatic-Pacific campaign ribbon in 1945, the first woman to receive the honor, as well as the Medal of Freedom in 1947. In 1995 the Coast Guard named their Pacific headquarters building in Hawaii after her for her impressive efforts during WWII. Florence lived in Ithaca from 1955 until her death in 2016.

In 2017 long-time Ithacan and Filipino-American Mimi Melegrito accepted a Congressional Gold Medal for her late father, Greg Melegrito as part of a long overdue recognition for the efforts of Filipino Americans during WWII. 

The History Center is actively seeking more local histories of Filipino-Americans from Tompkins County. Please connect with us to share more narratives.

The celebration of Filipino American History Month commemorates the first recorded presence of Filipinos in the continental United States, which occurred on October 18, 1587, when “Luzones Indios” came ashore from the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Esperanza and landed at what is now Morro Bay, California. U.S. Congress formally recognized October as Filipino American History Month in 2009. 

Part of the expansion of the HistoryForge project to include all of Tompkins County and not just the City of Ithaca, included solving the issue of finding early maps documenting the rural townships of Tompkins. A starting solution came in the form of the Clock & Compass Map system developed by John Byron Plato in the 1920's (learn more at Mark Monmoniers Book Talk on 10/8).

We recently completed the digitization of these materials and addition to the New York Heritage Digital Collections database as part of our ongoing partnership with the South Central Regional Library Council. We are thrilled to have the digitized "Clock System Rural Index" papers and maps for Groton Township, Caroline Township, Danby & Newfield Towns, Ithaca & Enfield Towns, Ulysses Township, Dryden Township, and Lansing Township now available to the public. 

Learn more about this unique mapping system in Monmoniers new book 'Clock & Compass: How John Byron Plato Gave Farmers a Real Address' available through The History Center's online bookstore for $20.

If you are interested in joining the HistoryForge team as a volunteer, please reach out to Eve Snyder at historyforge@thehistorycenter.net

LGBT+ History Month - October

Tompkins County and Ithaca has a longstanding history of being at the forefront of LGBTQ+ rights. A student led protest at Morrie's Bar in 1968 may have been the first gay student sit-in in the United States; and the Student Homophile League formed at Cornell University in 1969, was the second public gay student organization in the country. 

The first formal statement about bisexuality made by any religious or political group in the United States happened in Ithaca in 1972. The General Conference for Friends, brought 1,400 members and friends of Quakerism to Ithaca College for their annual convention. Over 130 people showed up to the bisexuality workshop, and the statement was drafted over the following days.

Details on all our current grant projects can be found at thehistorycenter.net/grants.

Completing just over 350 miles between Ben Sandberg's ride of 250.28 and History Center trustee Michael Smith's ride of 100 miles, Traverse Tompkins raised a phenomenal $13,368 in support of local history this year!

This was our third year of Traverse Tompkins, and for a fundraiser that was first implemented during the early years of the pandemic, it's been wonderful to watch it grow. This year we raised nearly $2,500 more than in 2021, and also grew significantly in our number of individual donors. 

With an astonishing 19 plus hours spent cycling this year, Ben thinks that 250 miles might be his 24-hour limit, but we hope to bring more cyclists in next year to help us expand Traverse Tompkins local history exploration even more! We've already got ideas brewing for next year, please reach out to director@thehistorycenter.net if you'd like to join in (or even just send his your congratulations for a ride well done this year)!

------------------

This article is from the October 2022 History Happenings Newsletter. 

Hispanic Heritage Month - September 15th - October 15th

Learn more Hispanic and Latinx local history at thehistorycenter.net/hispanic-heritage-month. Our thanks to our spring 2022 Exhibit Hall volunteer, Luis Valderrama, for their work translating our 'History at Home' learning and activity booklets into Spanish! 'All About Tommy' and 'The Ithaca Kitty' are now available for download and use in Spanish-speaking households and learning spaces in Tompkins County!

Connect with our archivist to contribute to our collections documenting Hispanic and Latinx history in Tompkins County - 

The Trumansburg Conservatory of Fine Arts (TCFA), founded in 1982, teaches students "in a range of  artistic endeavors," according to their website. The organization is housed in a beautiful historic Greek Revival building that was originally constructed as the Baptist Church of Ulysses, built in 1849.

We have recently received the original building specifications of the church that describe the details of its construction. These specifications spell out the agreement between the Second Baptist Society of Ulysses and Daniel Elmore of Ulysses, contractor, regarding all aspects of the construction, including basic drawings of the frame of the building. It dates from an era before professional architects, when the master builder oversaw all aspects of the building craft, from conception to final product.

Held for many years in the Conservatory offices, the TCFA Board of Trustees has determined that this important architectural information will be more accessible to researchers in The History Center's archives, and we are delighted to add it to our Town of Ulysses Collection.

For more information please email archives@thehistorycenter.net

Summer Projects at The History Center...

As engagement with local history on digital platforms has grown, we - along with others across the museum and arts field - have struggled with the long hours and high technical costs that go into digitizing our physical archives. 

This summer thanks to the work of multiple high-school interns, student workers, and docents, community volunteers, and local historians we've continued on the long process of digitizing and improving accessibility to our local history collections as well as national archives on digital platforms. 

This summer six Exhibit Hall workers transcribed over 380 pages through the Smithsonian Transcription Center; mostly contributing to digitization of the Freedmen's Bureau Papers, and 'Celebrating 175' collections. Our YES (Youth Employment Services) Teen Worker added five of our photograph collections to the platform HistoryPin. These collections have already been viewed by hundreds of people around the world! Our HistoryForge volunteers have made significant progress adding records to the HistoryForge Ithaca project and thanks to some very exciting grant news (read below!) are moving forward full steam ahead with the recently released 1950 census for the City of Ithaca. HistoryForge also recently completed the digitization of our Tompkins County Clock Maps to New York Heritage Digital Collections!

One of our undergraduate summer interns transcribed a series of 20-50 year old pamphlets about historic buildings and businesses in Tompkins County. Our high school interns also continued the year-long process of adding verified subtitles to all videos and programs on our YouTube channel. Adding captions to our videos ensures that they are accessible and easier to engage with for more audiences. It's a slow process, but we've now transcribed over 90% of our videos! Our volunteers in the archives in collaboration with THC staff, completed over a dozen additional Archival Finding Aids for our boxed collections, continuing the project funded by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation last year.

In addition the two part-time transcribers hired through our 'Preserving Community Oral Histories' grant from the American Historical Association in July have already made progress on dozens of interview transcripts from our Oral Histories of Tompkins County Collection in their first 8 weeks.

THANK YOU TO ALL OF OUR SUMMER WORKERS! We still have volunteer, docent, and internship positions available for the fall term for all ages. 

---------------------------------------

This article is from the September 2022 History Happenings newsletter.