Terwilliger House Museum
The Terwilliger House Museum is a late nineteenth century Queen Anne Victorian
house built in 1895, an appropriate setting for the library's extensive local history collection.
The museum's permanent collection preserves examples of glass jug, bottles and "whimsies" from Ellenville Glass Works and stoneware made at the Ellenville Pottery, products of industries that flourished in the heyday of the Delaware and Hudson Canal in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The second floor features the Joseph Y. Resnick Room, with photographs and memorabilia from the late congressman's tenure in Washington in the 1960's. Mr. Resnick was an Ellenville native. A display devoted to Clayton's Military Band--complete with a model bandstand and costumed mannequins--inhabits the second floor hallway as a testament to the band's nearly eighty year tradition as the pride of Ellenville.
Glass plate negatives, historic post cards and oral history cds complement the collection of artifacts and research material housed in the museum. The museum's research files contain a treasure trove of articles, ephemera and photographs. Other highlights of the research room include: Cemetery Records, Obituaries, Civil War Muster Rolls, Yearbooks from Ellenville Central School, Old Telephone Directories, Books on local history and environment, and books by local authors.
Pictured above is the Museum Advisory Committee Member Andy Helgesen with the new "Open" sign he made.
Museum Hours
Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 12 noon - 3 pm and by appointment.
Interested in history? Go to eplm.org and click on the Research Tools Tab. From there, you can visit Ancestry Plus in the RCLS databases (click on the History & Genealogy Resources tab) or go to the Ulster County InfoPortal and search on HeritageQuest or Ancestry.com. Over 700 people visited genealogy websites through our databases last year.
Check out our Postcard Collection at
Hudson River Valley Heritage
“They’re back!"
EPL&M is pleased to inform our community that the public access copies of our microfilm collection are ready for viewing. All public access copies are now “positives”, which means they appear as black print on a white background when viewed on the micro-film reader. Easier viewing, and more ecological printing! EPL&M extends their thanks to Hudson Micro-imaging which did an excellent job of evaluating and upgrading our collection.”
EPL&M’S MICROFILM COLLECTION
Back when our museum was housed “underground”, and Ellenville Public Library & Museum was located in the Hunt Memorial Building, we received a grant to photograph and microfilm our collection of original copies of The Ellenville Journal, Ellenville Press and other local publications, many from the 1800’s. Today, we have over 100 microfilms, which are widely used by community members. Periodically, the collection needs to be inventoried, evaluated, and when necessary, upgraded.
EPL&M is happy to announce that we have completed our microfilm inventory and upgrade, thanks to the expertise of Hudson Microimaging in Port Ewing. Master copies that were showing signs of deterioration were replaced, as were public access copies that were worn or scratched from use. A set of master negatives will be kept in the archival vaults at Hudson Microimaging, and a second set of Master Negatives is now housed here at the library. In addition, our public access copies are all “positives”, which makes them easier to read and more ecological to print. Microfilms are available to the public during regular library hours.
Why microfilm? The New York State Archives does not accept preservation plans that use other methods (such as digitation, which has yet to prove its longevity), and requires that microfilm be the basis of archival preservation. While digitation does make public access to archives, such as our historic newspapers, easier, our first priority is conservation, especially given financial constraints. Microfilms in good condition can, in the future, be used to create digital copies. A more expensive and archivally risky process would be to make digital images directly from the bound copies of the original publications in the museum. Meantime, we continue to develop our local history microfilm collection, adding contemporary films of our local Shawangunk Journals annually, as well as housing copies of the originals for posterity. Please call us at (845)647-5530 with any questions, or to make a donation in support of our historic collections.
