Putnam Valley Historical Society

The museum will be opening at 1:00pm today instead of our usual 10:00am.

Our annual holiday boutique will be held next weekend, December 14 & 15, at the Putnam Valley Library. More information (and a nice, colorful flyer) will be available tonight!

Refreshments will be served. Join us for a fun afternoon, and learn about our plans for 2020 and beyond.

We have a schedule change for November 9th’s Our American History – we will be welcoming Paul R. Martin III back to discuss Camps, Cradle of Aviation and Mitchel Field: The Military History of the Hempstead Plains, Long Island NY 1776-1961

We’re switching gears a bit this year for Halloween. We’ll be there rain or shine – the forecast seems to be changing hourly at this point.

We will supply the treat bags for the pumpkin hunt to ensure all participants get roughly the same amount of goodies. It’s also an ongoing thing, so you don’t have to be there exactly at 2:00pm for the pumpkin hunt. We’ll also have some fun games and snacks available.

It looks like there’s a nice spread of Halloween events between now and the 31st from several different organizations. Hope to see you on Sunday, costumes optional but suggested!

Our annual meeting previously scheduled for October 20th has been rescheduled to early December. We will be mailing new invitations and publishing flyers with updated information as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Also coming soon…

Our annual meeting is coming up in just under two weeks! Interested in attending? It’s $45.00/person – and that gets you a meal and entertainment. What a way to spend a Sunday afternoon! You can reserve your spot right here online (there’s a Paypal link on the top right of the page) or send payment to the Putnam Valley Historical Society, P.O. Box 297, Putnam Valley NY 10579.

We are closing up early to head over to Putnam Valley Town Park to set up for Town Day. If you’re local, head over and check us out! Visitors are welcomed from 2:00pm on, we’ll probably be there until 7:00 or so.

It feels like just yesterday we were celebrating the 4th of July, and now all of a sudden the trees are just starting to creep towards their own annual fireworks display.

We’re sometimes asked about the origin of the names of Putnam County and Putnam Valley – here’s your chance to learn about our namesake! Join us for the next installment of Our American History on September 14th as we welcome author and historian Robert Ernest Hubbard to the Putnam Valley Library to discuss Major General Israel Putnam: Hero of the American Revolution.

Also coming soon – you loved them as Hamilton and Burr, now see them as Nixon and Kennedy! Our dear friend and past board member Phil Keating and Putnam Valley Town Historian Dan Ricci will be back for our annual meeting on October 20th at 1:00pm to re-enact the Nixon-Kennedy Presidential Debate of 1960. The meeting will be held at the Putnam Valley Volunteer Ambulance Headquarters on Oscawana Lake Road. Look for the formal announcement with all the details including this year’s award recipients in the coming weeks. Invitations will be mailed to all members.

And finally – Halloween! We’ll be trying something different this year. Instead of having a guest speaker the Wednesday before Halloween, this year we’ll be having two small events on Sunday the 27th at the museum. In the afternoon, we’ll be having a pumpkin-egg hunt (think Easter egg hunt, but with tiny pumpkins instead) and games in the yard for the younger kids, followed by a haunted house inside the museum after dusk for the older kids and adults, and possibly a spooky ghost story about the history of our town.

First, an update on the pumpkins.

It seems the rabbits have discovered them. The very cute, tiny hopping bunnies along the back fence appear to have munched away at the biggest leaves. Not sure what that means for the livelihood of the rest of the plants, but we’ll get more seeds in the ground this weekend and try to block them off.

Second, an update on Our American History. We have a change in the topic for July. Sarah Johnson will still be our speaker, but we’ll be hearing about Putnam County in the Great Depression –  the relief efforts, how our residents coped, and what they did to help their neighbors.

We’ve also updated the yearly schedule for Our American History. Our award winning organizer has added a date in August (the 10th at 10:00am) for The Space Race: “Houston…the Eagle has Landed”. For those of you old enough, do you remember that amazing summer of 1969? What were you doing when man walked on the moon?