New Addition at the Museum of Early Trades & Crafts
9 Main Street, Madison, NJ 07940
973-377-2982
www.metc.org
info@metc.org
The Museum of Early Trades & Crafts (METC) located in Madison, New Jersey recently completed the build-out of a Viewable Storage Facility. After five years of planning and construction, this new space provides the museum with a state-of-the-art, on-site facility to house its collection of over 8,000 artifacts and archival materials, expanding the capacity to preserve the collection and strengthen conservation efforts. It also provides a renewed focus on collections management, which harnesses all the museum’s resources and knowledge, paving the way for future digitization of the collection.
Museums have always been exciting places to explore and learn; balancing education, research, and preservation while also maintaining their place as cultural databases. This $1.4.million project offers visual access for the public to observe the conservation and care of the collection through a large viewing area, creating another opportunity for education.
Museum of Early Trades & Crafts shares the past and imagines the future by exploring American history with a focus on the life and stories of 18th- and 19th- century craftsmen and artisans. Drawing on its rich collection, METC is connecting the lives of people and their stories, while providing a bridge from the past to the future. Housed in a stunning Richardsonian Romanesque Revival building donated by D. Willis James to the people of Madison in 1900, METC offers something for visitors of all ages.
Deborah Farrar Starker, METC’s Executive Director remarked that, “Protecting and preserving our cultural heritage benefits everyone and enables better access for scholarly research. From the very beginning of this project, we were focused on our responsibility as stewards of this material culture to maintain, conserve and protect it so that each object can tell its story about the people who used these tools, wore the clothing, wrote the letters and journals and left this legacy for us to learn from and to understand their individual histories.” Environmental circumstances necessitated speeding up the entire process, from design to build out, to cabinetry installation. “Working on such a timeline was both invigorating and stressful, commented Starker, “but being a small institution may have enabled us to be a bit nimbler in how we managed the entire process including working around schedules and re-arranging other projects.”
The museum gratefully acknowledges the many partners who were instrumental in funding this project, especially The National Endowment for Humanities, the New Jersey Historic Trust, The New Jersey Historical Commission, The Fred W. Breuhne Trust, Hyde & Watson Foundation, New Jersey Council for Humanities, Madison Open Space, Recreation & Historic Preservation, and The Charles L. Read Foundation.
Museum of Early Trades & Crafts
9 Main Street, Madison, NJ 07940
973-377-2982
www.metc.org
info@metc.org
[All images courtesy Museum of Early Trades & Crafts]