Our county historical societies are regional treasures, and Chemung County Historical Society even has a treasure vault.
Bank vault, anyhow. The Society’s home (and its Chemung Valley History Museum) are in the 1834 Chemung Canal Bank on Water Street in Elmira, where the vault is a showplace for an ever-refreshing exhibit of new acquisitions.
Just this month the main gallery reopened following a redesign and re-creation. Now there are two major exhibits in that space, beginning with “In the Valley of the Big Horn: A History of Chemung County.” Chemung derives from a Native expression naming the place where the horn was found – the “big horn” being a mammoth tusk… and a huge 11,000 year-old tusk, with its elegant curve, anchors the gallery.
The exhibit starts with Native life and its cruel disintegration during Sullivan’s invasion, and of course also includes Elmira’s time as a Civil War depot and prison camp. Visually striking are a HUGE canal lock key, a board from the old plank road down to the state line, and a model of Webb’s grist mill in Southport. A brick marked HH came from Horseheads Brick Company – and was used to build a building at Elmira College.
Even the 1950s are now history, as shown by the Airline console TV from Montgomery-Ward. That was fun, but I really enjoyed seeing the far older Trolley Card Game and the Telegraph Boy Game.
The other major exhibit here is “Mark Twain’s Elmira,” which besides showing the novelist himself also shows community life during that Gilded Age (to use a term that Mark Twain coined).
The Brick Barn Galley has a special exhibit, “’Til Death Do Us Part: Wedding and Funeral Customs in Chemung County.” This is a great visit for anybody who wants to think about the county’s past, but also about what it’s like today and what it will be like in future days.
Wedding clothes from the Victorian age and even earlier are joined by a small notebook in which Reverend Joseph Riggs recorded the weddings he performed as a traveling minister in the Twin Tiers, back before the Civil War. There were no official records back then, so notes like this might be the only way to know who was married to whom (and where, and when, and how much they paid for the ceremony).
A chuppa on loan from Congregation Kol Ami made me think of an acquaintance of mine who married her fiancee in a rail yard in Poland as they were being taken to concentration camps. She said, though, that it wasn’t a real wedding, as they didn’t have a canopy. She never saw him again, nor any of her family, nor any of his.
Muslim and Hindu weddings are being conducted in Chemung these days, and both are represented here. The Hindu wedding includes a flame (false flame in the exhibit). There’s also a miniature of a Hindu wedding.
Not being Catholic, I had never thought about a crucifix such as I saw from the 1942 Bednarchik/Novick wedding in St. Casimir’s. Presented at the time of the wedding, it includes candles and oil to be used one day for extreme unction, a feature that I found deeply moving.
The Brayton Education Room had “Elmira Will See it Through! World War I Fund-Raising Posters.” This was the golden age of the poster, guaranteeing an eye-popping exhibit. ‘Beat Back the Hun’ and ‘Remember Belgium’ appeal on the basis of German atrocities… and while propaganda blew them up, they were all too horribly real. ‘Stamp! Stamp! Stamp! The Boys Are Marching’ plays on an old Civil War song (‘Tramp, Tramp, Tramp’) to sell savings stamp. A 1919 sheet showing suggested ways to display posters uses for examples the very posters to either side. That was fun to see.
And then there was what we actually came for: “Stitched Across the Valley: A Cross Cultural Embroidery Exhibit.” This developed five key themes – social status; national and ethnic identity; industrial and domestic production; family stories; and tradition and individual innovation.
I would have liked to see the technique of each piece identified, and my observation is that making a label in 12-point type, then placing it at the foot of a dressmaker’s dummy, is an exercise in futility. But those are minor matters. All of it was interesting, and some of the pieces were arresting. I had never even heard of double-sided stitching on a sheet of transparent silk. I’ll just repeat what I wrote in my notebook: wow!
I also was not familiar with the Peruvian apiller technique, with its rounded figures and its frequent use for family and community histories. “Never Forget” commemorates the 1980-2000 deaths at government hands.
Besides advanced and unusual techniques there were printed embroidery such as a simple picture of the Fatima appearance, a historic cross-stitch sampler, a crewel scene of a barn in winter. While I liked the barn, and was staggered by the doubled-sided silk, my favorite was Aniko Farkas’s brightly-colored flowers in Hungarian kalocsa style, followed by a flowered white skirt and blouse by an unknown Polish artisan.
So – our communities are varied, and their histories are long. Drop in at the museum on Water Street, and expand your horizons.