Baldwin Historical Society celebrates 40th anniversary

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Baldwin Historical Society founders, from left, Jim Moreland, Al Fam, James McKeon and Rolf Mahler broke ground on the museum on July 10, 1976.
Baldwin Historical Society founders, from left, Jim Moreland, Al Fam, James McKeon and Rolf Mahler broke ground on the museum on July 10, 1976.
Nakeem Grant/Herald

On July 10, the Baldwin Historical Society celebrated its 40th anniversary. On that day in 1976, members of the group broke ground for a museum on Grand Avenue.

Current historical society members, now the keepers of Baldwin’s past, reminisced about the past four decades. Gary Farkash, the group’s president, said that the museum has collected artifacts dating back to 1767. He credited the society’s founder, James McKeon, with establishing a place where residents can look back on the town’s history.

“James McKeon was a very famous photographer and was the first president of the museum,” Farkash said. “He enlisted a couple of hundred of the townspeople who lived here all their lives to collect, preserve and eventually display Baldwin’s history.”

McKeon broke ground for the museum with his fellow society members Jim Moreland, Al Fam and Rolf Mahler, the father of Erik Mahler, the current president of the Chamber of Commerce.

Over its 40 years, the historical society has collaborated with other groups in Baldwin, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Baldwin Community Garden, the Lions Club and the Baldwin Civic Association. Karen Montalbano, president of the civic association, is also the vice president and curator for the historical society.

“I’ve always enjoyed history,” Montalbano said. “I enjoy seeing what this place was, what our town was and learning about what has happened here.”

From tree branches to vintage bicycles, the museum tells the hamlet’s history of Baldwin, and among the items it displays is the Baldwin Bicentennial Historical Quilt.

The colorful quilt, framed on the wall, depicts several events. Created in 1975 by local women, the quilt features 42 squares of images representing notable moments in that history.

“There’s a lot to be proud of in this town,” Montalbano said. “There’s a lot of great things that have happened in this community. Working in this museum allows me a chance to find out about that.”

Farkash and Montalbano also work with Doris Lister, the group’s treasurer, who is well versed in Baldwin’s history and has been a part of the museum for over 20 years, to preserve all of its contents. Lister said she hoped that community members could help maintain the museum like they did in its early years.

“It started as a small community where everybody helped everybody else, and it blossomed into a business,” she said. “But it wasn’t until it became a big business, where people had two or three jobs, that people didn’t have the same community spirit that they had years ago. We’re trying to get it back again with the museum.”

Lister’s ties to the museum go much deeper than her membership. Her husband, former Lt. Bruce A. Lister, has a set of hat and gloves framed in the museum from his time in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Lister stated that keeping the museum up and running was important not only to preserve the history of people like her husband, but because community members longed for a place to come together.

“The people love something where everybody is included,” Lister said. “Whether it’s a fair, picnic, a dinner or something along those lines, we’re trying to establish that here — something that will bring people together.” Despite the small indoor space, the museum has a large field that it has cleaned up over the years, where people walk their dogs and kids run and play or ride bikes.

Farkash, who moved to Baldwin from Rosedale in 2007, said that the diversity here is another factor that makes the town stand out in Nassau County. “What I like about it is the fact that Baldwin is the United Nations,” he said. “That’s how I look at it. You look at the religions, you look at the ethnicities here — we have everybody. I’m going to see if we can change the name to Baldwin United Nations or something like that because it’s really that type of community.”

Historical society members credited a group effort involving themselves and other residents for spurring the growth of the museum. “No one person is in charge,” Lister said. “That, to me, is the most beautiful thing, because the relationships we have let our ideas melt together and come up with something that’s really fabulous.”