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Our New Exhibit:

School Days, School Days
A Historical View

Our new exhibit traces the history of the Hastings School System -- more than 150 years old -- with artifacts and memorabilia spanning the years.

For a slide show of the exhibit, click here. Or to go to the exhibit webpage, click here.

A New Dayliner on the Hudson?

In 2009, it will be the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's and Samuel Champlain's historic voyages through what is now New York State and the 200th anniversary of Robert Fulton's steamship voyage on the Hudson River. The state has formed a commission of legislators and various agency heads to plan a grand celebration of these milestones. To find out more about the 2009 Hudson River Quadricentennial, click here. The Village of Hastings and the Hastings Historical Society will be observing the anniversary, too. For a Fall 2000 Hastings Historian article on the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration, click here.

At the Hastings Historical Society's annual meeting on Sunday, June 10, we were treated to a lecture and slide show by Richard Anderson: "Steamboating on the Hudson and the S.S. Columbia Project." The S.S. Columbia (right) is an excursion steamer being restored for travel on the Hudson River for the 2009 Hudson River Quadricentennial. Project organizers hope the Columbia will be a floating museum as well as a means of promoting tourism in the Hudson Valley. For more information, click here.

Our Latest Gift Creation

The Hastings-on-Hudson
Birthday Calendar

The latest addition to the Historical Society collection can be used year after year. The beautiful birthday calendar features 12 black-and-white photographs from the archives of the Hastings Historical Society, plus color cover, all printed on heavy fine-quality paper. Photos include ice skating on the Reynolds Field tennis courts (1935), a swimming hole on the Saw Mill River (1927), and Main Street immobilized after a 1947 blizzard. $15 or two for $25. To order, visit our Emporium or click here for a printable order form.

The award-winning*

Museum in the Streets® is now open!

The centuries-long history of Hastings-on-Hudson is now accessible to all who live, work and visit here, thanks to a new project of the Hastings Historical Society. A historical walking tour of Hastings, starting at Boulanger Plaza, features signs with Village history and photos at 34 different historical sites. For more information, click here.

*The Hastings Historical Society recently received an "Award toward Excellence" for the Museum in the Streets® from the Lower Hudson Conference of Historical Agencies and Museums, which called the project "a unique, illustrated bilingual walking tour and street exhibition using archival materials and presenting them to citizens, school children, and heritage tourists alike in a direct and engaging way."

Lewis Hine in
Hastings-on-Hudson

Forty photographs from our archival collection have found their way onto the Internet! These striking pictures of Hastings and its residents were taken by Lewis W. Hine, one of America's most important documentary photographers, during the 1920s and '30s when he lived on Edgars Lane. Unlike his famous images of Ellis Island and the Empire State Building, these photographs have never been exhibited or published before. French historian of photography Frédéric Perrier selected the images and wrote the fascinating introduction describing Hine's life in Hastings. Click here to see the online exhibition, which appears on Luminous-Lint, a new website devoted to the history of photography.

The Mary Allison Archive Project Campaign

The Hastings Historical Society has embarked on a three-year campaign to raise funds for an exciting new project that will create a computerized database of our vast holdings of documents, photos, maps, oral histories, works of art, family papers, and more.

Named for a former Society president and Village Historian, who died in 2000, the Mary Allison Archive Project will make accessing the riches of our collection and learning about Hastings' history easier than it has ever been.

For more information, click here.