Join Dutchess County Historian Will Tatum and the Millbrook Historical Society for an evening of reading the historical landscape of Millbrook and Washington. While historians are most closely associated with dusty volumes and sepia-toned photographs, the landscape around us often provides many important pieces of data without which we could not understand the changes and continuity within the local past. Drawing on a multi-century perspective including historical maps, Tatum will discuss how key features in the Millbrook and Washington landscape today testify to past activities and settlement forms that are otherwise lost to time, and remind us that decisions made hundreds of years ago still impact our lives now.

MHS is represented on a six-town committee, of which four of the towns have Meeting Houses still standing. Those four Meeting Houses will be open to  tour starting June 1st. The first Sunday of each month, 12-4:00 pm,  June-July-Aug-Sept-Oct-November, the four Meeting Houses will be open to the public with docents there to guide and answer questions. The experience will be augmented with educational banners. Visitors are invited to explore one or all four on any given day of open house. 

https://www.meetinghousetour.com/

These programs are free. 
Note: while on tour of the Meeting Houses, there are no bathrooms on premises. 

This event was originally scheduled for May 15, then moved to May 29. It will now happen on October 16.

This fall there will be two opportunities to take part in walking tours of the village with a focus on its history and development.  The tours are designed as an introduction to Millbrook history and are intended for people who are interested in learning about the founding of the village and some of the key figures, events, and places in its history.  They will begin at the top on the stairs in the Tribute Garden and end by the firehouse on Front St. and cover a little more than 1 mile.  The tours will be held on Saturday, September 27 from 11am to 12:30pm and Sunday, October 12 from 11am to 12:30pm.  The tours will be limited to 20 participants each and are free for members of the Millbrook Historical Society.  The cost for non-members is $20 a person.  To reserve a spot, please email millbrookhistoricalsociety@gmail.com with all relevant information.  

MHS is represented on a six-town committee, of which four of the towns have Meeting Houses still standing. Those four Meeting Houses will be open to  tour starting June 1st. The first Sunday of each month, 12-4:00 pm,  June-July-Aug-Sept-Oct-November, the four Meeting Houses will be open to the public with docents there to guide and answer questions. The experience will be augmented with educational banners. Visitors are invited to explore one or all four on any given day of open house. 

https://www.meetinghousetour.com/

These programs are free. 
Note: while on tour of the Meeting Houses, there are no bathrooms on premises. 

This fall there will be two opportunities to take part in walking tours of the village with a focus on its history and development.  The tours are designed as an introduction to Millbrook history and are intended for people who are interested in learning about the founding of the village and some of the key figures, events, and places in its history.  They will begin at the top on the stairs in the Tribute Garden and end by the firehouse on Front St. and cover a little more than 1 mile.  The tours will be held on Saturday, September 27 from 11am to 12:30pm and Sunday, October 12 from 11am to 12:30pm.  The tours will be limited to 20 participants each and are free for members of the Millbrook Historical Society.  The cost for non-members is $20 a person.  To reserve a spot, please email millbrookhistoricalsociety@gmail.com with all relevant information.  

Between 1773 and 1777, seventeen enslaved people were manumitted, or freed, by members of the Nine Partners Quaker Meeting in what today is Millbrook.  This talk will trace the evolution of Quaker views of slavery in the decades leading up to these manumissions and explore how Friends grappled with the complicated theological and moral questions surrounding enslavement and emancipation.     

This month we are adding to the tour date itself with speaker Kathy Moyer, who will talk about the Nine Partners Boarding School that once stood just to the east of the Brick Meeting House. A widely known and influential school established by the Yearly Meeting of Flushing, it was in session 1796 - 1863. 

In Kathy's words, "While Quakers believed in equality of the sexes, it was nonetheless unconventional in the educational community to open a school at Nine Partners for equal education of both boys & girls in December 1796. The sole difference was that boys learned subjects appropriate for a career while girls learned sewing. Examples of their sampler-making are included as part of the presentation. " Afterwards people will be invited to join a brief cemetery tour viewing gravestones of those associated with the school!

Kathy Moyer has long researched and is in the process of writing a book on this subject .

(Please note: the talk is embedded within the Open House Tour hours 12-4:00.)

MHS is represented on a six-town committee, of which four of the towns have Meeting Houses still standing. Those four Meeting Houses will be open to  tour starting June 1st. The first Sunday of each month, 12-4:00 pm,  June-July-Aug-Sept-Oct-November, the four Meeting Houses will be open to the public with docents there to guide and answer questions. The experience will be augmented with educational banners. Visitors are invited to explore one or all four on any given day of open house. 

https://www.meetinghousetour.com/

These programs are free. 
Note: while on tour of the Meeting Houses, there are no bathrooms on premises. 

MHS is represented on a six-town committee, of which four of the towns have Meeting Houses still standing. Those four Meeting Houses will be open to  tour starting June 1st. The first Sunday of each month, 12-4:00 pm,  June-July-Aug-Sept-Oct-November, the four Meeting Houses will be open to the public with docents there to guide and answer questions. The experience will be augmented with educational banners. Visitors are invited to explore one or all four on any given day of open house. 

https://www.meetinghousetour.com/

These programs are free. 
Note: while on tour of the Meeting Houses, there are no bathrooms on premises. 

After fire destroyed its earlier building, the Nine Partners Monthly Meeting erected a capacious two-story brick meetinghouse in 1780-81, which cost more than ₤800. Solidly built and well preserved with few later alterations, the meetinghouse is one of the earliest examples of a symmetrically arranged Quaker meetinghouse in the Hudson Valley. It was symbolic of the Quaker belief in the equality of the two sexes in religious matters—in worship and business meetings. This presentation by architectural historian Carl Lounsbury will explore the dynamic changes in Quaker meetinghouse plans in America and place Nine Partners in context with others erected in the Hudson Valley and New England in the late eighteenth century.

MHS is represented on a six-town committee, of which four of the towns have Meeting Houses still standing. Those four Meeting Houses will be open to  tour starting June 1st. The first Sunday of each month, 12-4:00 pm,  June-July-Aug-Sept-Oct-November, the four Meeting Houses will be open to the public with docents there to guide and answer questions. The experience will be augmented with educational banners. Visitors are invited to explore one or all four on any given day of open house. 

https://www.meetinghousetour.com/

These programs are free. 
Note: while on tour of the Meeting Houses, there are no bathrooms on premises. 

New York’s Quakers are important figures in the antislavery history of New York Colony and New York State. At times over-shadowed by their more famous brethren in Pennsylvania, New York’s Quakers have not always been featured in the history of 18th-century abolitionism as much as they should be, especially given their vital important to the end of heritable bondage in the northern state with the highest number of slaves on the eve of the American Revolution. This talk will explore the rise and nature of Quaker antislavery in the colonial era, with an attention to the grassroots stories of real Quakers and enslaved people in the Hudson Valley, in particular. Featuring unpublished primary sources and an emphasis on how Quakers and enslaved New Yorkers put continual pressure on proslavery forces in New York, it will explain why New York began to slowly abolish slavery how it did and when it did in the wake of the Revolution. 

MHS is represented on a six-town committee, of which four of the towns have Meeting Houses still standing. Those four Meeting Houses will be open to  tour starting June 1st. The first Sunday of each month, 12-4:00 pm,  June-July-Aug-Sept-Oct-November, the four Meeting Houses will be open to the public with docents there to guide and answer questions. The experience will be augmented with educational banners. Visitors are invited to explore one or all four on any given day of open house. 

https://www.meetinghousetour.com/

These programs are free. 
Note: while on tour of the Meeting Houses, there are no bathrooms on premises. 

State Historian Devin R. Lander will present on the Millbrook Commune’s involvement in the emerging psychedelic multimedia art scene of the 1960s. The presentation will include not only discussion of the artwork produced by Timothy Leary’s Millbrook group, but also the philosophical underpinnings of the group’s quest to communicate the psychedelic experience through artistic means.

In the mid-1760s Dutchess County became a literal and figurative battleground as Wappinger Indians, colonial farmers, and local landlords fought over the past, present, and future of these lands. First Natives and their tenants combined forces to contend for their rights in New York courts. Losing that fight, they took separate paths in search of justice: tenant farmers set up a “Mob Government,” unrest that culminated in a firefight with British troops and a show trial of the “Mob Men” in Poughkeepsie; Wappingers, meanwhile, led by sachem Daniel Nimham, sailed to England to plead their case with King George III. This controversy, long forgotten, has much to tell us about Natives and newcomers, about power and resistance, about connections between then and now.

For years, the British have received credit for "inventing" America, but it was the Dutch who truly deserve recognition for founding what has become one of the greatest cities in the world. You'll hear how modern America began with the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam and though it lasted only 40 years before the English took over, these were crucial years that laid the foundation for the diversity, tolerance, and commerce that define New York City today.