The best guide to The Long Island Museum in New York

Located on Route 25A in Stony Brook and a quick distance from the still-strolling Grist Mill and the historic Three Village Inn, the Long Island Museum gives traffic an immersion into the area's rural beyond via 3 cutting-edge exhibition homes and 5 genuine systems sprawled throughout a nine-acre campus. Accredited with the aid of using the American Alliance of Museums in 1978 due to its excellence in exhibitions, programs, and series care, and one of the country's few Smithsonian affiliates, it shows American records and artwork with a Long Island connection. Tracing its origins to the Suffolk Museum, whose authentic Christine Street constructing stills stand today, it became installed to preserve, exhibit, and interpret artifacts with the aid of using 5 founding participants at the quit of the Great Depression: Ward Melville; his wife, Dorothy Bigelow Melville; Robert Cushman Murphy, an outstanding naturalist; Winfred Curtis, a nearby doctor; and O. C. Lempert, a coverage broker. A developing series, at the side of the addition of carriages in 1952, quickly induced the look for new headquarters, which took shape because of the History Museum on one aspect of Route 25A. New to the then-named "Museums at Stony Brook," it became antique to the area. The web page became as soon as the area of the D. T. Bayles Lumber Mill, whose lineage stretches lower back to 1874 and which operated till 1955. Melville bought the construction at that time. "Ward Melville usually desired Stony Brook to be a village just like those discovered in New England," in step with the Long Island Museum's website. "The Long Island Museum became stimulated with the aid of using this premise and museum grounds quickly resembled a New England village as nearby ancient homes had been cautiously tucked onto the grounds... Since 1939, the museum has grown to emerge as the main group on Long Island and the best Smithsonian associate withinside the region." THE HISTORY MUSEUM The History Museum, which serves because the Visitor's Center and present shop, is the area of converting artwork exhibitions. Its maximum recent "Fire and Form: New Directions in Glass," for instance, encompassed a few fifty works with the aid of using 8 current artists, whose style of approaches, inspirations, and beginning factors tested the near-limitless nature of sculptural creation. The separate Cowles Gallery, named after Sharon Cowles, who as soon as lived subsequent to Dorothy and Ward Melville and currently made a full-size contribution to the museum, showcases works from its everlasting series. THE DOROTHY AND WARD MELVILLE CARRIAGE MUSEUM Cornerstone of the Long Island Museum complex, that is positioned throughout Route 25A, the 40,000-square-foot Dorothy and Ward Melville Carriage Museum occupies the web page of the previous Stony Brook Hotel and depicts the pre-motorized transportation generation through greater than one hundred horse-drawn motors displayed in 8 galleries. Its centerpiece, which is seen as quickly because the traveler enters the construction, is the "Grace Darling," a 45-passenger, superbly adorned omnibus firstly pulled with the aid of using a half-dozen horses. Richly upholstered and spring-provisioned to lessen wheel influences on unpaved trails, it became hired on tours to Coastal Maine between the Eighties and the early twentieth century. The "Going Places" Gallery capabilities carriages that had been generally used on Long Island, at the side of a fiber optic map that illustrates the improvement of local transportation routes. The Wells Fargo Coach, one in all its exhibits, is a consultant of the motors utilized by Wells Fargo and Company, whose transportation offerings had been critical to the country's westward expansion. Inaugurating an overland passenger carrier in April of 1887, it assessed the then-astronomical fare of $275.00 for the Sacramento, California, to Omaha, Nebraska, route. The "Carriage Exhibition" Gallery, primarily based totally upon the 1893 World's Fair transportation construction, highlights the opulence wealth ought to inject right into a carriage. The "Making Carriages: From Hometown Shop to Factory" capabilities the museum's series of motors that had been factory-constructed with the aid of using the Studebaker Brothers, in addition to withinside the Graves Brother's Carriage Shop, an authentic, nineteenth century, Williamsburg, Massachusetts facility that has been reassembled here. The "Streets of New York" Gallery, entire with simulated burning homes, shows the styles of carriages and motors that plied its bustling streets. One of them, an 1887 avenue vehicle, allows the traveler to hint at the origins of mass transportation. Pulled with the aid of using one or horses, it rode on rails, allowing New York City to transport its hundreds of horse vehicle traces between 1832 and 1917. They had been changed with the aid of using motorized avenue vehicles and trolleys, earlier than being usurped with the aid of using steam-powered, increased railroads that in the long run gave manner to electric, underground subways.
The Crawford House Coach, placed within the "Driving for Sport associated Pleasure" Gallery, was sold to the New Hampshire resort of identical name in 1880, transporting up to twenty passengers, their baggage, and product between the train station and therefore the hotel, and plying narrow, winding roads because it did. The "Long Island in the Carriage Era" could be a recreation of an intermodal transportation scene. associate actual deport wagon once picked up passengers at the Stony Brook station of the Long Island Railroad and delivered them to the encircling villages. The puffing sound of steam locomotives completes the re-creation. though equid carriages might not evoke pictures of luxury, 2 alternative galleries dispel this myth-the "Gentlemen Coach House" and therefore the "European Vehicles" ones. the previous displays the luxurious vehicles that impressed the 19th-century Gold Coast carriage houses, that were once integral to Long Island's North Shore mansions, and the latter showcases the royal vehicles that were employed by European nobility. THE deposit field apart from the Dorothy and Ward author Carriage deposit, the first structures on the rest of the Long Island Museum campus, accessed by walkways, exude a rural area feel. The prophet H. West metalworker Shop, one among them, dates to 1834 and was originally placed off of Main Street in close Setauket. fully reconstructed between 1875 and 1893, the building, of mortise and projection circular sawn timbers, was the center of his multi-faceted, reticular trades, including horse-shoeing, wheel and wheel vehicle creating and repairing, and blacksmithing. however, the looks of the motorized automobile throughout the Nineteen Twenties shortly obviated its need. Some 3 decades later, The Museums of Stony Brook's nonheritable structure, currently displays era artifacts. The 1794 Williamson Barn next to that was originally placed on the Stony Brook farm of Jedidiah Williamson, a Revolutionary War hero who created his living as a farmer, a millwright, and a carpenter. The 1867 Smith Carriage Shed, next to the barn, was originally located on the Timothy Smith farm in St. James and was accustomed shield carriages from inclement weather whereas parishioners attended services at the next-door St. James Episcopal Church. Its atomic number 26 rings served as horse ties throughout this time. No 19th-century restoration would be complete while not the almost symbolic one-room schoolhouse, and therefore the Long Island deposit field doesn't fail in hits respect. selected Nassakeag, or South Setauket, Schoolhouse, it had been made by Frederick A. Smith in 1877 on Sheep Pasture Road in its terribly human city on the positioning of a previous 1821-built structure that served an identical purpose. thanks to the area'' considerably smaller population, it offered a completely totally different instructional thought than fashionable establishments do. It housed close to thirty students who ranged from 5 to fifteen years archaic and who all occupied the same space. It was, the maximum amount a tiny, single-room building might achieve, sexually separated, boys coming into the correct door and women entering the left, and every sitting on their several sides. every room contained a coat, hat, pail, and cup hooks. The heat was provided by one stove and a single teacher instructed all grades. Students used notebooks made from paper, also as effaceable slates. The syllabus entailed the 3 "r'"-that is, reading writing, and arithmetic. The school's rural location set its seasonal sessions, including those in summer and winter, whereas spring and fall were reserved for home life, wherever students were respectively required for the all-important planting and harvesting, at the side of the total variety of alternative farm functions. when the Setauket faculty districts were consolidated in 1910, the building fell into disrepair, however, was nonheritable by The deposits of Stony Brook and moved to its field forty-six years later. Museum educators sporadically provide categories within the schoolhouse. ahead of it's a fountain and horse trough. given to any town in 1880 by giver Olivia Egleston Phelps Stokes and originally standing at the intersection of Madison Avenue and twenty-third Street, it is an associate example of fine arts stone and marble work. The 20-ton structure provided drinkable for each folk and horse. however once it had been rendered obsolete by the automobile, it was demolished in 1957 and purchased by the Long Island Museum. currently placed next to a herb garden, it's totally functioning. alternative field attractions embody the Smith-Rudyard Burial Ground, which remains on its original website and contains headstones from 1796 to 1865, and a deposit building, whose 2 galleries feature dynamic exhibitions, showcasing yank art and history. Its most up-to-date one, "Tiffany Glass: Painting with Color and Light," was thought of as the primary of its kind at the Long Island deposit. "As a painter, prizefighter C. creative person was captivated by the interaction of sunshine and color, and this fascination found its most spectacular expression in his glass paintings," in keeping with the museum's website. "Using new and innovative techniques and material, Tiffany Studios created leaded-glass windows and lampshades in spirited colors and richly varied patterns, textures, and opacities." The Long Island Museum offers a come to rural, 19th-century life and prompts reflections on and re-interpretations of the present one.