Columbia County Historical Society

5 Albany Avenue

Kinderhook, NY 12106

(518) 758-9265

Columbia County Historical Society

Open: Sunday 11:00am-4:00pm/Monday-Friday Closed/Saturday 11:00am-4:00pm

My review on TripAdvisor:

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60899-d12000596-Reviews-Columbia_County_Historical_Society_Museum_Library-Kinderhook_New_York.html

The Columbia County Historical Society Museum

The main building of the Historical Society contains an exhibition on farming. It also contains the society’s library and genealogy center.

The James Vanderpoel House Museum

The afternoon I visited the society, the Vanderpoel House was the only building open but it was interesting to visit. I saw the early American portraits.

History of the House:

One of the finest examples of Federal architecture in Columbia County, the James Vanderpoel House was constructed circa 1819–1820 for prominent Kinderhook lawyer and judge James Vanderpoel. 

Trimmed with marble and built with local brick, the side-gabled structure has two stories, five bays, and rests on a fieldstone foundation. Symmetry and graceful architectural details are found throughout the home. Purchased by the Columbia County Historical Society in 1925, the property is now preserved as an exhibition space showcasing paintings and decorative arts from the CCHS permanent collection and is home to the CCHS Museum Store & Bookshop (CCHS website).

There are two exhibitions going on right now:

New York Portraits from the permanent collection:

Columbia County’s painted portraiture legacy spans more than three centuries of historically significant or artistically important works by self-taught, naïve and itinerant painters, as well as important artists of the time, and including some of the earliest works in America.

In the Portraits of the Permanent Collection shows us how the middle to upper middle class in the early years before photography was created to be remembered. Portraits were the best way to show the families wealth and prestige in the community plus keep families legacies alive. Today many of these families descendants don’t know what to do with them. This is our benefit that we can enjoy these private works of art.

Portraits from the Permanent Collection sign

The Gallery

The Gallery

The New York portraits in the collection

The New York Portrait Collection exhibition

The Portrait Collection-Children’s Portrait

Part of the Portrait and Federal Style exhibitions

Early Hand Tools & Farm Implements: the permanent collection

In the main building, there is also a permanent collection of farming equipment and the development of family farms in New York State. It shows how the agricultural profession has changed from doing everything by hand when farms catered solely to the family to the commercial farms that developed after the Civil War that found new markets for their products. Automation grew the industry but its start with equipment shows how much the process really hasn’t changed that much. It is a very thought provoking exhibit on how industries progress.

The “Early Hand Tools & Farm Implements” exhibitions

The farming equipment galleries

The farming equipment galleries

The farm equipment at the turn of last century that has not changed much to today.

The new exhibition “Dirt Road Life: Images of Rural Community” again shows how life has progressed in this country.

The description of the exhibition and collection of the artwork:

(From the museum website):

In this exhibit an extensive collection of vintage photographs provided by CCHS and Red Rock Historical Society that document what life was like along these dirt roads a century ago are complemented and contrasted with local high school students’ photos of contemporary winter scenes along Chatham’s unpaved network of roads.   The students’ photographs, curated by nationally celebrated photographer Paul Lange, are drawn from a body of work that is the brainchild of Ichabod Crane art teacher Sandy Dwileski.  Dwileski saw an artistic opportunity—winter road scapes rich in subtle hues, shadow contrasts and complex compositions—and set about organizing an outing with her advanced photography class to follow the system of roads mapped by the Chatham Dirt Road Coalition and photograph the journey.

The new exhibition “Dirt Road Life: Images of Rural Community”

The gallery exhibition on “Dirt Road Life”

Pictures from the exhibition

Pictures from the exhibition

The next special exhibition at the museum was the “A Farm, a Family and a Legacy”:

(from the museum website)

Farms have been the heart of Columbia County’s economy and culture throughout its history. One of these was Birge Hill Farm, established in 1785 by Hosea Birge, a Revolutionary War veteran who settled in Chatham, N.Y., in the early years of the republic.

The write up on the exhibition

The deed to the original farm

Here and on other small farms, families and neighbors worked cheek by jowl to sustain their small, tightly woven communities, until vast changes in technology, industry and society forever altered their rural way of life. 

The Birge Family artifacts in this interesting exhibition of family life on a multi generational farm

The farm is currently for sale

This exhibition presents highlights from the Birge Family Collection, donated to the Columbia County Historical Society by Hosea’s fourth great-grandson, Van Calhoun, and Van’s wife, Susan Senecah. The expansive collection comprises more than 200 objects, preserved by family members with remarkable foresight and care over eight generations. In their stories, we see the evolution of farm and family life in Columbia

The family heirloms

The current farmhouse of the family’s

The exhibition was interesting in that it must be hard for a family giving up a way of life and a home that has been in the family for 200 years. It was nice of the family to let us in and see their life in this exhibition.

Federal Style: Refinement, Grace and Symmetry:

America’s newly founded nation beamed with patriotism following its victory in the Revolutionary War. The original foundations of the United States government and culture immediately following its independence is known as the Federal Era (1780–1830).

George Washington and other American icons looked toward the Classical ages of Greece and Rome in forging an identity for the young American Republic through architecture, furniture, textiles, ceramics and works of art. Neoclassical designs and motifs are distinguished through simple lines, a satisfying balance of symmetry and overall elegance that signals strength and democracy. In celebrating 200 years of the James Vanderpoel House, we present its Federal architectural excellence along with diverse material culture representing characteristics of the Federal Style and era in Columbia County and America (CCHS website).

The other buildings that are part of the Society’s museum:

Signage at the Historical Houses

The Crane Schoolhouse

This authentic, circa-1850 one-room schoolhouse served as a public school for the Town of Kinderhook into the 1940s. It replaced an earlier “log cabin-style” single-room school where a man named Jesse Merwin served as school master. Merwin, who was a longtime friend of the writer Washington Irving, is said to have been the “pattern” for Irving’s character of Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

A “Legends & Lore” historic marker, awarded by the New York Folklore Society and William G. Pomeroy Foundation, stands a few yards from the school and commemorates this literary connection. Today, the Ichabod Crane Schoolhouse is a seasonal museum. See exhibitions, period school desks and other objects relating to one-room schoolhouse education in Columbia County.

During the 1950s and ’60s, it was saved from disrepair by a group of local women who retrofitted the space to function as an ad hoc community center. In 1952, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited the schoolhouse to deliver a radio address praising “the work of women” and recognizing their efforts to preserve the historic school.

In 1974, the schoolhouse was moved 200 yards down the road to the Luykas Van Alen House site. That same decade, it was restored to its 1930s appearance. It remains an excellent and intact example of a rural, one-room schoolhouse with a gable roof, clapboard siding and a single pent-roofed entrance. The interior consists of a large classroom with two adjacent cloakrooms — one for boys and one for girls. The building was never modified to have heat or hot water and still retains its original 1929 wood-burning stove, wood flooring, chalkboards and double-hung sash windows(CCHS website).

Luykas Van Alen House

Built circa 1737 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1967, the Luykas Van Alen house is recognized as one of the best examples of fewer than a dozen historically intact Dutch Colonial houses in the Hudson Valley. 

Located on rural land once used by native Mohican peoples for hunting and seasonal camping, the house was the center of a prosperous farm and home to several generations of the Van Alen family. The last Van Alen descendant to live in the house, Maria Van Alen Herrick, died in 1935. The house was purchased in 1938 by William Van Alen, a descendant of Luykas’ brother, Johannes. In 1964, unable to undertake extensive restorations himself, William generously donated the house to Columbia County Historical Society (CCHS website).

The signage by the Van Alen House