We preserve the past, but we don’t live in it. This year, the Society implemented a revised mission statement and a thoughtful new strategic plan that seeks to expand our role as stewards of the Richardson-Bates House Museum and as the premier resource for Oswego County history.
Our Year in Highlights
“The Oswego County Historical Society seeks to interpret its collections to connect the community to past, present and future topics relevant to local history, and to promote a public interest in Oswego County’s historical resources.”
Oswego County Historical Society’s revised mission statement
We preserve the past, but we don’t live in it. This small statement was a guiding principle of sorts for the organization this last fiscal year. Honoring the past while casting our sights toward the future is what allowed the Oswego County Historical Society to undergo some major changes in the last 12 months that are paving the way toward stability and longevity.
Strategic Planning
Perhaps the most immediate of these changes is at the very beginning of this report! Oswego County Historical Society’s revised mission statement signals a dramatic shifting of tides for our organization. This change did not happen overnight, nor did it happen flippantly. In the spring of 2023, the Society embarked on a strategic planning process to lay the groundwork for the future of the organization. This culminated in a June retreat at late board member Neal Johnson’s home, where the board hashed out the vision and strategy for the Society’s next three years. The new mission statement was one of the changes made at this retreat.
Barbara Paxton leads the board’s June strategic planning retreat. We were honored to host her all the way from New York City!
With a grant from the Documentary Heritage and Preservation Services of New York (DHPSNY) and the guidance of Barbara Paxton of the New York-based non-profit consultancy group BoardStrong, the board of trustees detailed our strategic goals and renewed vision into a working plan, mapped across five categories:
- Collections Care, Management, and Access: Strive for continuous improvement of collections stewardship and maintain a coordinated archiving system with conservation, proper storage, and preservation at the forefront.
- Facilities Management: Improve the condition of the Richardson-Bates House and maximize the use of our historic home and its collections by making the artifacts more physically and digitally accessible.
- Museum Programming: Strengthen programming to increase the use of the house and grounds, promote audience engagement and community involvement, grow memberships, and create stronger financial support. Programming that takes advantage of Dr. Mary Walker’s national spotlight is a specific benchmark of this category.
- Revenue Generation and Fundraising: Strengthen our organizational revenue models for planned giving campaigns, more aggressive membership campaigns, and corporate sponsorships, to ensure sustainability and renovation of the Richardson-Bates House and grounds.
- Organizational Infrastructure and Leadership: To strengthen and maintain the organizational leadership, systems and structure needed to sustain our growing organization, the Society will build an inclusive board of trustees better reflective of Oswego County’s population to contribute their skills toward honoring our renewed mission and vision.
This strategic plan, and the goals encompassed in these five categories, form the groundwork of all the projects, programming, and initiatives outlined in this annual report, and will guide the organization for the next handful of years. You can view a more detailed vision statement and read the specifics of our strategic plan on our Mission & Vision page.
Coming out of that strategic planning retreat, it was clear to the board that one of the next major projects would have to be upgrading our website, as it was long past-due for an overhaul and aligned to our new strategic plan. Board member Joey Sweener has previously detailed the behind-the-scenes of how the Society’s new website came to be built, but worth reiterating in this report is the tremendous collaboration between board members, staff and volunteers to keep a project of this scale moving at an ambitious pace with such a small committee at the helm. Major kudos to that team. Patrons should look forward to more features coming to the website in the following weeks, months, and years.
Digital Preservation
Digital preservation is also an ongoing focus, with museum assistant Evelyn Frederiksen taking the helm of digitizing over 5,000 photo negatives in the Frank Barbeau collection, making them positives and preparing them for our digital repository on New York Heritage. All this while volunteer Nan Moore and secretary Eva Corradino accessioned more of our collections, and volunteers Pat Bruel, Kristen Nylen, Alison Anderson and Peg Peck indexed and digitized scrapbooks. Once these collections are made digitally available on our New York Heritage repository, keep an eye on our website’s Collections Highlights page for curated overviews of all their hard work.
Maintenance
Sadly, this was the year that board member and volunteer Neal Johnson lost his years-long battle with cancer. Neal was the main proponent of displaying Dr. Mary Walker’s Medal of Honor permanently at the museum, and was our resident expert on all things maintenance at the museum. With his passing, a Neal Johnson Fund was arranged by his surviving family, with nearly $2,000 already being donated to the Society in his honor. That money will go toward facilities management and construction projects at the museum.
And not all hope is lost! Volunteer and incoming board member Dan Ruddy has taken up Neal’s mantle of facilities manager with ease, overseeing major projects this year. Among them is brand new basement storage; though the basement itself remains unfinished, humidity is now controlled with a sump pump and commercial dehumidifiers, which allowed Dan to clean, paint, and wire new lighting in the one finished room. The space will be used for supplies storage and collections processing.
Other maintenance projects this year included removing the Norway maple along the southwest corner of the building, and tending to our rare Copper beech tree’s myriad symptoms with a professional pruning and bark treatment. Looking ahead, the removal of the Norway maple is leaving the south side of the museum feeling bare, and the board is currently researching appropriate solutions for new tree-life planted further from the building. The tree’s removal also unearthed some ongoing issues with the museum’s soffit on that southwest side; though a temporary patch has been built, long-term restoration will be slated for the coming year.
Events, Programming & Outreach
Aligned with our strategic plan, this was the year of Dr. Mary Walker. With the Fort in Virginia being renamed in her honor, and the American Women’s Quarter Program prominently featuring her this year, the Society sought to take advantage of this national attention to work toward getting her Congressional Medal of Honor permanently displayed at the Richardson-Bates House Museum; we own her original, after all!
Such a goal is what launched the Mary Walker Campaign, a $36,000 capital campaign created to meet this historic milestone. In order to safely display the Medal of Honor, we needed a secure museum-grade display case from Gaylord Archival, a more robust security system, and to secure the gallery space’s entrances to maintain a predictable flow of foot traffic on the second floor. With historic donations from the Oswego County Legislature, Richard S. Shineman Foundation and the William G. Pomeroy Foundation, as well as through individual donations, we exceeded our campaign goal in under six months and the display is installed and ready to be viewed today!
This wasn’t the only Walker-related fun we’ve had this year: in October, we’re happy to be hosting Kathie Barnes and her production of Independence: the True Story of Dr. Mary Walker, a one-woman show dramatizing and recounting Dr. Walker’s life. More information about that event can be found in our Events listings; please plan to come!
Our other events this year included some returning ones and some brand new initiatives.
For the first time this year, we sponsored a Medal of Honor Day event, allowing Town of Oswego historian George DeMass to speak about Dr. Walker and Scriba Historical Society’s Laurie Marrano-Johnson to discuss Medal of Honor recipient Curtis Shoup. Our display included Shoup’s medal, and other artifacts from our collections pertaining to him.
We also added a new fundraiser this year! Robert Berkeley Physical Therapy sponsored a Retro Movie Night in April (not to be confused with our larger fundraiser, Classic Movie Night), and we raised about $1,600 with our showing of Back to the Future. Berkeley intends to continue to sponsor the event, and we are happy to continue it next year!
Our Lecture Series this year saw two prominent speakers: Karen Lankeshofer gave a compelling talk on Elsa Von Blumen, the female cycling trailblazer from Henrietta, N.Y.; and Oswego’s own Lee Ellen Hickey discussed the history behind her landmark new book, The Girl in the Glass Coffin: The Tonkin Affairs.
In community outreach, the Society was thrilled to offer two long-term loans of items from our collections to local institutions. The first is a charcoal drawing of Gerrit Smith loaned to the Oswego Public Library, and the second is a portrait of Dr. Mary Walker’s mother, Vesta, loaned to the Oswego Town Historical Society’s display.
Our collaboration with SUNY Oswego remains as strong as ever. This year, the museum hosted two interns from the university: Zachary Kingsley, who created a video tour of our second floor and translating our guided tours into French and German; and Grace Zlobl, who processed some of the Beadle-Bentley Collection and worked with volunteer Alyson DeCosa on inventorying the museum’s textiles. But perhaps our largest collaboration this year took the form of two virtual touring websites, working with Bastian Tenbergen’s Computer Engineering class to concept and create one about Dr. Mary Walker and two pertaining to the Underground Railroad. Those sites will be live and usable soon. And, as always, we deploy the help of local sororities and fraternities looking to complete community service to help rake leaves, clean our grounds, and move important collections out of our stuffy basement and into better storage locations.
Our Year in Numbers
826
Visitors to the Richardson-Bates House Museum was over 800 this year.
171
The total membership of the Oswego County Historical Society to date is 171.
$15K
In Annual Giving appeals alone, the Society raised over $15,000 in 2023.
$40K
The Mary Walker Campaign to permanently display her Medal of Honor raised over $40,000, in only six months!
37
37 grantors and donors contributed to the Mary Walker Campaign. Notable donors are listed alongside the exhibit.
5,000
The Frank Barbeau collection houses over 5,000 negatives being digitized and converted to positives.
Our Supporters
The Society and museum are nothing without our vibrant members, generous donors, and unforgettable volunteers. Your continued support of the Oswego County Historical Society is what allows us to create dynamic programming, pursue new projects, and make history yours in Oswego County. An esteemed thank you to everybody who supported us this year. Learn more about supporting Oswego County Historical Society and view our list of sponsors.
Financial Summary
