A day in the life of the Shelter Island History Center
Another chapter in our continuing series looking at the daily lives of Island institutions.
The Shelter Island History Center is a museum and archive operated by the Shelter Island Historical Society. Located on South Ferry Road in Haven’s House, built prior to the American Revolution.
Anyone over 20 remembers when it didn’t look that different from the other 250-year-old houses around here; a farm-house with an attic, a barn, and retired farm equipment in the yard. Today it’s a vibrant center for research, museum exhibits, community events, shopping at the seasonal farmers market, and a year-round gift shop.
With a mission like that, Executive Director Nanette Lawrenson says there is no such thing as a typical day. But here’s what happened on Thursday, Jan. 24, 2024.
9 a.m.
Serge Pierro, the Havens House Store Manager, is usually the first one in, although the Center doesn’t open to the public until 10 a.m.
Mr. Pierro got busy with internet orders that came in overnight, and restocking the store, which carries crafts and art made on the Island, including Megan Hergrueter’s ceramics, Diana Malcolmson’s paintings, Kim Curko’s candles, signed posters designed by Kiki Boucher, and jewelry by Stephanie Sareyani, who taught art at the Shelter Island school for 28 years.
The shop stocks books about Shelter Island, mostly by Shelter Island-based writers. Mr. Pierro says the current best-seller is a book about life on the Island during the American Revolution. Between serving customers, he orders new items, and fills online orders.
Foot traffic in January is generally light. “It goes in streaks. Closer to Valentine’s Day, we’ll get more traffic. Birthday presents, housewarming gifts, those customers could come in anytime.”
10:05 a.m.
Ms. Lawrenson and Mr. Pierro gather at the conference table in a large gallery with Archivist Kaitlin Ketcham and Museum Collections Curator Lucas Deupree for a staff meeting. Mr. Deupree is in the middle of removing an exhibit from the gallery that recently closed to make way for a new one.
The meeting commences with a celebration of the just-published article in Northforker magazine featuring Alexandra Binder’s dance school. Ms. Binder, who just left the Center in October, was Ms. Lawrenson’s first hire when she came to the History Center in 2012.
10:17 a.m.
Mr. Pierro reports on the shipment of bespoke Belgian chocolates that will arrive in time for Valentine’s Day sales in the shop. “Kaitlin has offered to handle the package when it arrives,” Mr. Pierro says, in case he’s not there to store the temperature-sensitive treats with a Shelter Island logo. All agreed it was a dirty job, but someone had to step up and do it.
11:15 a.m.
In a former closet, once thought to be haunted, Sophia Strauss is editing a video for the Living History Project. She’s using Premier Pro and Otter to combine clips from interviews with Rose Wissemann and Esther Hunt into a video piece about Alice Fiske.
Ms. Strauss started the Living History project with Julia Labrozzi when they were in high school, recording audio interviews of fellow students, and ended up studying film in college. The Living History project has grown into an audio and video archive of recollections of Shelter Island people, and she now creates new films made from those interviews at the History Center.
11:50 a.m.
Archivist Ketcham is in the middle of setting up a new scanner that the History Center has purchased with a grant, and she can’t wait to show it off.
“We have fragile and large objects in the collection,” Ms. Ketcham explains, using the example of the Town Charter, which bears the signatures of the Town’s founding fathers. “But we had to send them out to be digitized, so we’ve been researching how to digitize things here.”
The device is an overhead scanner that allows scanning without anything touching the object, and will scan very large objects in sections, which saves a trip to Montauk to use the only other suitable scanner on the East End, at the Montauk Public Lbrary.
12:07 p.m.
A reporter comes in with a question for the archivist about a document related to rum-running, and she quickly directs them to the answer. “If it’s a quick question, I can answer it on the spot,” Ms. Ketcham says. “Questions come from reporters, students, professional researchers, and we’re a primary resource for the real estate community with a database of homes from the 1980s to now.”
She says about 15% of the information is digitized and the other 85% is in the card catalog. Her office chair swivels all day from computer to the antique wooden cases behind her.
12:21 p.m.
Collections Manager Deupree is looking at baskets, as he assembles them and does research for a new exhibit that will open this spring. “Most people don’t know what we have,” Mr. Deupree says, so when he identifies an interesting group of objects, he considers how to make them more accessible to the public.
That’s exactly what happened when he discovered five baskets in the collection — including a bassinet and an eel pot — and realized that they were all the work of one man, Isaac Downs, who lived on Shelter Island around the turn of the last century and died in 1924.
Mr. Deupree is planning an exhibit of Isaac Down’s baskets this summer, and hopes to uncover more information about him and his work. “We think Vincent King Jr. was a great-great grandson, and Vera Anderson may be a connection. We’d love to hear from people who knew him, or who think they may have one of his baskets.”
1 p.m.
Ms. Lawrenson is at her desk in a corner office that was once the third-best bedroom in the old house, planning for this summer’s musical, “A Deck of Ferry Tales,” the story of a movie that was shot on the ferry, and enlivened with many other tales (all true) of ferry adventures. Ms. Lawrenson doesn’t get to do the fun part, however.
“I just ordered our stage for the play. Negotiated the contract and saved us some money.” Her next task was reviewing the report of a carriage consultant, Mary Ferrell, who oversaw restoration of carriages for the Carriage Museum in Stonybrook.
“We have four carriages in the barn, and we have to decide if we want them repaired and restored completely or just preserved and presentable,” Ms. Lawrenson said, adding that she’s blessed with “a fantastic Board of Directors” to navigate decisions of this kind.
Then she turned to a stack of “thank you” letters to donors and supporters of the Shelter Island Historical Society, to which she adds personal notes, a practice she follows every day that she can. “I just think it makes a big difference, to write something of a personal nature.”
2:02 p.m.
The History Center closes to the public for the day. It’s open year-round Monday to Saturday, 10 to 2.
5 p.m.
The rest of the staff has headed home, and Mr. Pierro locks up for the day.
Off the clock …
The Center is a virtual resource for volunteers and the public no matter what time of day. Board member Maggie Murphy, for example, has been editing audio recordings from the 1970s and 1980s remotely in hopes of unlocking the voices in the History Center’s collection for a podcast.
Shelter Island homeowners can now go online to register their homes in the House Registry, a project that started in the 1980s when Bill Meringer decided to document the history of Shelter Island’s homes, which led to the current effort to register all the homes on the Island — and share every house’s story.
