Poking around a dusty old barn on a rain-soaked April morning might not seem like a fun time to most teenagers, but don’t tell that to the band of enthusiastic young history students from Riverhead High School, who spent the morning inventorying and tagging artifacts in a barn at Hallockville Museum Farm today.
“The amount of local history surprised me,” said 10th-grader Alec Buczynski, 15, of Polish Town. “I really didn’t know much about Riverhead. There’s a lot of interesting stuff.”
Alec was one of about 30 students in Justin Cobis’ History of Long Island class, who worked side by side with Hallockville staff and board members to photograph, catalog and tag hundreds of artifacts dating back to the early 18th century.
“It’s really important that we know what’s here and get it all finally documented in our accession system,” which is a record of a museum’s holdings, said Hallockville board member Richard Wines. Hallockville is creating a digital database of all artifacts, complete with photographs. At the same time, each item is being tagged with a coded number representing the year documented, the item’s donor and serial number.
“You never know. It could all disappear in a heartbeat, like at the Southold Unitarian church,” said board member Mary Anne Huntington, referring to the fire that destroyed the historic Main Road church and everything inside it. “This way at least we will have some off-site record.”
The students performed “a herculean task” today, Huntington said.
Sophomore Shannon Zeltmann, 16, of Riverhead, said she enjoys learning about local history and working to preserve it. Shannon volunteers in the town historian’s office, cataloging maps and digitizing cemetery records. She is also going to digitize church records for the United Methodist Church in Riverhead— which date back to 1833, she said.
Cobis said the high school has been offering the local history course, an elective, for the past four years. He brought the idea to the district and wrote the curriculum because he’s always had a passion for American and local history.
Hands-on work like today’s brings local history alive for the students, Cobis said. Students worked in four teams of 6 or 7 people each.
They also got a tour of the farm and walked to the Sound to the site of a battle in the War of 1812, accompanied by Wines.
RiverheadLOCAL photos by Denise Civiletti
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