History
A group of parents who belonged to the Rutherford Parent-Teacher Association founded the museum. They collected artifacts of natural history, including local mineral specimens, as well as items relating to the area's Native American heritage.
The first location for the museum was a room at Rutherford's Sylvan School, and the collection was known as the Sylvan School Museum and open to students in the Rutherford public schools. In the late 1960s, the school district needed the classroom space once again, and the museum relocated to an office building on Ames Avenue and called itself the Rutherford Museum.
In 1974, the museum purchased the Yereance-Berry House at Crane Avenue and Meadow Road. The house, most of which was built in the early 19th century, is on the National Register of Historic Places, although a portion of the house was removed when Crane Avenue was built through to Meadow Road in the 1930s.
Read more about this topic: Meadowlands Museum
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Attributed to Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)