CNY Living History Center

If you are familiar with the CNY Living History Center and our mission, then you would know that we switch out our displays and exhibits once a year.  We are unique in many aspects, one being that we house three different museums each catering to three different aspects of history and all three of them change once a year, which takes a lot of time and effort.  This year we are taking extra efforts to build on the creativity we had last year with our exhibits. Get a glimpse below into what our exhibits are going to be like!

The red barn in our lot houses our TOYS, or Tractors of Yesteryears, collection.  The barn has a main floor as well as a section named “Grandma’s Kitchen and Parlor.”  Together these two sections symbolize what everyday life was like on in your typical rural household hold in a time past.  This year on our main floor we have a tractor display that we are calling, “You Saw It Here First!” The idea behind this display is to showcase some tractors that had were designed to have a significant feature, something that made changes to tractor manufacturing or improved farming efficiency.  Also in our display cases on the main floor we will have different agricultural hand tools. These are to give the visitor a look into what farming was like before it was modernized and mechanized like we see today. In “Grandma’s Kitchen, Parlor, and Laundry,” we have a main display describing how butter was made back when people used to make it themselves at home.  The display will feature butter making tools and utensils that will paint the picture of life in years past. This main display will tie into the additional displays that will feature other homemade goods that were often times bartered for different goods like flour, salt, or sugar.

Our Homeville museum houses the entire Eaton Collection pertaining to military, local, and national history and is truly a one of a kind collection.  In its entirety, there are over 10,000 artifacts in the collection. This is one of the many reasons why our displays switch over because if they didn’t in Homeville then a majority of the Eaton Collection would go unseen, packed away in storage.  Our curator and volunteers do an amazing job each year of bringing new and exciting displays to life. This year we struck gold with one donation from a local resident which was a diary from a Japanese soldier describing his final days and the final days of World War II.  This diary will be brought to life with a cave display and true to life mannequin all with translations from the diary in Japanese as well as English from one of our talented volunteers. Another special display we have planned for this year is our new display remembering General Levi Chase of Cortland County, and we have brought in his own grandson, Bill Chase, to help curate it for us.  We also plan on building a Civil War field camp display that will showcase different aspects of a soldier’s life living and fighting on the battlefield in the 1860’s. These are just a few of the many changes that will be happening Homeville for 2018.

For the Brockway museum well, if you attended last year’s truck parade, then you no doubt saw maybe one or two of the truck we will have on display for this year.  You see, our curators in with BTPA, or Brockway Truck preservation Association, look back on the truck show registrations to see which ones they would like to bring back for the display.  Last year we managed to have 2016 Trucker’s choice Award winner leave his truck on display. We had over 135 truck registrations to choose from for this year’s display, but our curators are keeping it a secret so you’ll have to come see them for yourself! Meanwhile, if you prefer working as a truck driver, there are Truck Driver Opportunities available that will suit your skills and experience.

All of these displays talked about in the article plus others that have not been mentioned will be unveiled the third weekend in May so make sure to mark your calendars!  In the meantime, you can find out more about us and the CNY Living History Center on our website at www.cnylivinghsitory.org and follow us on Facebook and Instagram.