NEWS
IMPERILED HERITAGE
History in the unmaking Rochester Historical Society archivist Bill Keeler examines Seth Green’s handmade tackle box. Green was a pioneer in fish farming and established the first fish hatchery in the United States. PHOTOS BY MAX SCHULTE
Out of sight and out of mind, Rochester Historical Society, the city’s oldest cultural institution, is selling off its collection to stay afloat. BY STEVE ORR
O
ut of sight and out of mind, Rochester’s oldest cultural institution is floundering, its storied collection shrinking and largely inaccessible to the public. The Rochester Historical Society, founded 160 years ago, is almost broke. To pay the rent, it periodically sells off items its representatives say are superfluous to its mission of collecting and preserving records and artifacts important to the city’s history. Meanwhile, the society doesn’t have a full inventory of its holdings or a website, has a lone part-time employee, and has moved four times in the last 14 CITY JANUARY 2021
12 years. The last was in December, when the society quietly decamped to a cheaper space on University Avenue with less than half the square footage of its previous home. Historians and museum officials have expressed deep concern, and in some cases outright anger, over the society’s stewardship of a ballyhooed collection that includes belongings of some of the city’s most prominent names, including Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Rochester. “While it’s common for these institutions to operate on bare-bones
budgets, the Rochester Historical Society seems to be a colossal failure, a disaster,” said Michael Leroy Oberg, a distinguished professor of history at SUNY Geneseo. “It’s sad, because the resources they have are stunning,” Oberg added. “If they still have them.” The state has been asked to look into the historical society’s collectionmanagement practices, but officials in Albany declined to say if they are doing so. State regulators undertook a similar inquiry a dozen years ago though took no action. Behind the scenes, movers in the
local and state museum world have met several times with society leaders about mapping out a way forward, but none
