The Long Island Museum

Located off Route 25A in Stony Brook and within walking distance of the still-operating Grist Mill and the historic Three Village Inn, the Long Island Museum offers visitors an immersion into the area’s rural past through three modern exhibit buildings and five authentic structures scattered across a nine-acre campus.

Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1978 for excellence in exhibits, programs, and collection care, and one of the few Smithsonian affiliates in the country, it showcases American history and art with a Long Island connection.

With its origins in the Suffolk Museum, whose original Christine Street building still stands, it was established to preserve, exhibit and interpret artifacts by five founding members at the end of the Great Depression: Ward Melville; his wife, Dorothy Bigelow Melville; Robert Cushman Murphy, noted naturalist; Winfred Curtis, a local doctor; and OC Lemphert, insurance broker.

A growing collection, along with the addition of carriages in 1952, soon prompted a search for a new location, which came to fruition as the History Museum off Route 25A. New to the then called “Museums at Stony Brook”, I was old to the area.

The site was once the location of the DT Bayles Lumber Mill, whose lineage dates back to 1874 and operated until 1955. Melville purchased the building at this time.

“Ward Melville always wanted Stony Brook to be a town similar to those found in New England,” according to the Long Island Museum website. “The Long Island Museum was inspired by this premise, and the museum grounds soon resembled a New England village, as local historic buildings were carefully placed on the grounds…Since 1939, the museum has grown to become a leading institution on Long Island and the only Smithsonian affiliate in the region.

THE HISTORY MUSEUM

The History Museum, which serves as both a Visitor Center and gift shop, is the venue for changing art exhibits. His most recent “Fire and Form: New Directions in Glass,” for example, encompassed some fifty works by eight contemporary artists, whose variety of approaches, inspirations, and starting points demonstrated the nearly infinite nature of sculptural creation.

The separate Cowles Gallery, named after Sharon Cowles, who once lived alongside Dorothy and Ward Melville and recently made a significant contribution to the museum, displays works from its permanent collection.

DOROTHY AND WARD MELVILLE CARRIAGE MUSEUM

A cornerstone of the Long Island Museum complex, which is located just across Route 25A, the 40,000-square-foot Dorothy and Ward Melville Carriage Museum occupies the site of the former Stony Brook Hotel and represents the era of pre-motorized transportation. through more than a hundred horse-drawn vehicles exhibited in eight galleries.

Its centerpiece, which is visible as soon as the visitor enters the building, is the “Grace Darling”, a beautifully decorated 45-passenger omnibus, originally drawn by half a dozen horses. Richly upholstered and spring-loaded to reduce wheel shock on unpaved trails, it was used on excursions to the Maine coast between the 1880s and the early 20th century.

The “Going Places” gallery features carriages that were commonly used on Long Island, along with a fiber optic map illustrating the development of regional transportation routes.

The Wells Fargo Coach, one of its exhibits, is representative of the vehicles used by Wells Fargo and Company, whose transportation services were vital to the country’s westward expansion. Inaugurating overland passenger service in April 1887, he assessed the then astronomical fare of $275.00 for the route from Sacramento, California, to Omaha, Nebraska.

The “Carriage Exhibit” gallery, based on the carriage building from the 1893 World’s Fair, highlights the opulence that wealth could inject into a carriage.

“Carriage Making: From Hometown Shop to Factory” features the museum’s collection of vehicles that were factory-built by the Studebaker brothers, as well as the Graves brothers’ carriage shop, an original facility from the 19th century in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, which has been reassembled here.

The “Streets of New York” gallery, complete with simulated burning buildings, displays the types of carriages and vehicles that once roamed its bustling streets. One of them, a tram from 1887, allows the visitor to trace the origins of mass transportation. Pulled by one or two horses, it traveled on rails, allowing New York City to move its masses on horse-drawn carriage lines between 1832 and 1917. They were replaced by motorized streetcars and streetcars, before being usurped by elevated railways to steam that eventually gave way to electric and underground subways.

The Crawford House Coach, located in the “Driving for Sport and Pleasure” gallery, was sold to the New Hampshire resort of the same name in 1880, carrying up to 20 passengers, their luggage and merchandise between the train station and the hotel. and bending narrow and winding roads as he did.

“Long Island in the Age of the Carriage” is a recreation of an intermodal transportation scene. An actual deportation wagon once picked up passengers at the Long Island Railroad’s Stony Brook station and delivered them to surrounding villages. The puffing of the steam locomotives completes the recreation.

Although horse-drawn carriages may not evoke images of luxury, two other galleries dispel this myth: the “Gentlemen’s Carriage House” and the “European Vehicles” gallery. The first shows the opulent vehicles that inspired the 19th century Gold Coast carriage houses, once an integral part of Long Island’s North Shore mansions, and the second shows the royal vehicles used by European nobility.

THE MUSEUM CAMPUS

In addition to the Dorothy and Ward Melville Carriage Museum, the original structures on the rest of the Long Island Museum campus, accessed by walkways, exude a rural feel.

The Samuel H. West Smithy, one of these, dates to 1834 and was originally located on Main Street in nearby Setauket. Completely rebuilt between 1875 and 1893, the building, of circular mortise-and-tenon lumber, was the heart of his multifaceted and interrelated trades, which included ironwork, wheel and wheel vehicle manufacturing and repair, and blacksmithing. But the appearance of the motorized automobile during the 1920s soon eliminated its need.

Some three decades later, The Museums of Stony Brook acquired the structure, which now displays artifacts from the period.

The 1794 Williamson Barn next door was originally located on the Stony Brook farm of Jedidiah Williamson, a Revolutionary War hero who made his living as a farmer, mill builder, and carpenter.

The 1867 Smith Carriage Shed, next to the barn, was originally located on Timothy Smith’s farm in St. James and was used to protect carriages from the weather while parishioners attended services at St. James Episcopal Church. .James next door. Its wrought iron rings served as horse tethers during this time.

No 19th-century restoration would be complete without the almost symbolic one-room schoolhouse, and the Long Island Museum campus does not fail in its respect. Designated Nassakeag, or South Setauket, Schoolhouse, it was built by Frederick A. Smith in 1877 on Sheep Pasture Road in his namesake town on the site of an earlier structure built in 1821 for the same purpose.

Due to the area’s significantly smaller population, it offered a completely different educational concept than modern institutions. It housed approximately thirty students ranging in age from five to fifteen years old, occupying the same space. It was, as much as a small one-room building could manage, sexually separated, the boys entering the right door and the girls entering the left, each sitting on their respective sides. Each vestibule contained hooks for coats, hats, buckets, and mugs. Heat was provided by a single stove and a single teacher taught all grades. The students used notebooks made of paper, as well as erasable whiteboards. The curriculum involved the three “r’s”, that is, reading, writing and “rhythmetic”.

The school’s rural location dictated its seasonal sessions, which included summer and winter, while spring and fall were reserved for home life, where students were respectively needed for planting and harvesting, plus all the range of other agricultural functions. .

After the Setauket school districts were consolidated in 1910, the building fell into disrepair, but was acquired by The Museums of Stony Brook and moved to its campus 46 years later.

Museum educators regularly offer classes at the school.

Opposite there is a fountain and a horse trough. Donated to New York City in 1880 by philanthropist Olivia Egleston Phelps Stokes and originally located at the intersection of Madison Avenue and 23rd Street, it is an example of Beaux Arts stone and marble work. The 20-ton structure provided drinking water for both people and horses. But when it was made obsolete by the automobile, it was dismantled in 1957 and acquired by the Long Island Museum. Now located next to an herb garden, it is fully operational.

Other campus attractions include the Smith-Rudyard Cemetery, which remains on its original site and contains headstones from 1796 to 1865, and a museum building, whose two galleries feature temporary exhibits showcasing American art and history.

The most recent, “Tiffany Glass: Painting with Color and Light,” was considered the first of its kind at the Long Island Museum.

“As a painter, Louis C. Tiffany was captivated by the interplay of light and color, and this fascination found its most spectacular expression in his paintings on glass,” according to the museum’s website. “Using new and innovative techniques and materials, Tiffany Studios created LED glass windows and lampshades in vibrant colors and richly varied patterns, textures and opacities.”

The Long Island Museum offers a return to 19th century rural life and reflections and reinterpretations of the present.