Located on Route 25A in Stony Brook and a short distance from the still-running Grist Mill and the historic Three Village Inn, the Long Island Museum offers visitors an immersion into the area's rural past through three modern exhibition buildings and five authentic structures sprawled across a nine-acre campus.
Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1978 because of its excellence in exhibitions, programs, and collection care, and one of the country's few Smithsonian affiliates, it displays American history and art with a Long Island connection.
Tracing its origins to the Suffolk Museum, whose original Christine Street building stills stands today, it was established to preserve, exhibit, and interpret artefacts by five founding members at the end of the Great Depression: Ward Melville; his wife, Dorothy Bigelow Melville; Robert Cushman Murphy, a prominent naturalist; Winfred Curtis, a local doctor; and O. C. Lemphert, an insurance broker.
A growing collection, along with the addition of carriages in 1952, soon prompted the search for new headquarters, which took form as the History Museum on one side of Route 25A. New to the then-named "Museums at Stony Brook," it was old to the area.
The site was once the location of the D. T. Bayles Lumber Mill, whose lineage stretches back to 1874 and which operated until 1955. Melville purchased the building at that time.
"Ward Melville always wanted Stony Brook to be a village similar to the ones found in New England," according to the Long Island Museum's website. "The Long Island Museum was inspired by this premise and museum grounds soon resembled a New England village as local historic buildings were carefully tucked onto the grounds... Since 1939, the museum has grown to become a leading institution on Long Island and the only Smithsonian affiliate in the region."
THE HISTORY MUSEUM
The History Museum, which serves as the Visitor's Center and gift shop, is the location of changing art exhibitions. Its most recent "Fire and Form: New Directions in Glass," for instance, encompassed some fifty works by eight contemporary artists, whose variety of approaches, inspirations, and starting points demonstrated the near-infinite nature of sculptural creation.
The separate Cowles Gallery, named after Sharon Cowles, who once lived next to Dorothy and Ward Melville and recently made a significant contribution to the museum, showcases works from its permanent collection.
THE DOROTHY AND WARD MELVILLE CARRIAGE MUSEUM
Cornerstone of the Long Island Museum complex, which is located across Route 25A, the 40,000-square-foot Dorothy and Ward Melville Carriage Museum occupies the site of the former Stony Brook Hotel and depicts the pre-motorized purposetime era by means of more than a hundred horse-drawn vehicles displayed in eight galleries.
Its centerpiece, which is visible as soon as the visitor enters the building, is the "Grace Darling," a 45-passenger, beautifully decorated omnibus originally pulled by a half-dozen horses. Richly upholstered and spring-provisioned to reduce wheel impacts on unpaved trails, it was employed on excursions to Coastal Maine between the 1880s and the early-20th century.
The "Going Places" Gallery features carriages that were commonly used on Long Island, along with a fiber optic map that illustrates the development of regional transportation routes.
The Wells Fargo Coach, one of its exhibits, is representative of the vehicles used by Wells Fargo and Company, whose transportation services were vital to the country's westward expansion. Inaugurating overland passenger service in April of 1887, it assessed the then-astronomical fare of $275.00 for the Sacramento, California, to Omaha, Nebraska, route.
The "Carriage Exhibition" Gallery, based upon the 1893 World's Fair transportation building, highlights the opulence wealth could inject into a carriage.