Paterson Museum hits centennial with new exhibit spotlighting 100 years of local history

• Visitors can expect to see rare memorabilia of hometown heroes including baseball star Larry Doby and comedian and actor Lou Costello.
• But there are also things like taxidermied insects and fluorescent rocks that might seem out of place at first.

PATERSON — A new exhibition called "One Hundred Artifacts for One Hundred Years" opens on March 29 at the Paterson Museum in celebration of its centennial.

The museum’s story is being told through unexpected and rarely seen artifacts, many of which have been collecting dust in the back room of the museum. Visitors can expect to see rare memorabilia of hometown heroes, including baseball star Larry Doby and comedian and actor Lou Costello, not to mention a stew pot from the now-shuttered Libby’s Restaurant and a wooden sliding pond from a former public school.

But there are also things like taxidermied insects and fluorescent rocks that might seem out of place unless you knew the origins of this institution.

Story continues below photo gallery.

“When the Paterson Museum was founded, the idea of museums was much different than it is today,” said Heather Garside, the museum's history curator, who gave Paterson Press a recent tour of the museum. “It was about bringing the world to Paterson — you would show things from all over the world.”

In 1925, when the museum was formed as a committee at the Danforth Memorial Library, many Paterson residents would never have had the chance to travel around the globe. But a trip to the museum let them see something as exotic as an Asian butterfly, which is found in a glass case in the exhibition.

The museum was initially focused on natural history, boasting Lenape ceramic artifacts, taxidermied creatures and thousands of rock specimens.

Its first curator was a geologist named James Morton, who said in 1927, during an exhibition held in a carriage house behind the public library, that he hoped the collection would “awaken the souls and spirits of human beings,” the Morning Call reported.

Natural history remained the focus of the Paterson Museum for decades, and there was a standing tradition of geologists leading the museum as its director, including James Peters, who had a mineral named after him. 

In 1980s, a shift to Paterson's industrial history

In 1982, the collection was moved to its current home in a 19th-century factory called the Thomas Rogers Building, where the building’s namesake assembled locomotives.

At the time, the Rogers building and other historic mills in the area were being restored as part of a local preservation movement. On the day of the museum’s move, a photograph on the front page of The News showed three men humorously hauling a taxidermied alligator into the new building at 2 Market St.

The relocation to the Rogers Building was fitting because the focus of the museum’s collection was shifting away from natural history to the city’s industrial history. Today, old-fashioned skeins and warping machines from Paterson factories can be seen, along with products made in those factories: Samuel Colt’s Civil War-era firearms, and John Holland’s famous submarine.

In particular, there is something about the atmosphere of the Thomas Rogers Building that breathes life into the exhibit on trains. Paterson used to be one of the nation’s epicenters of locomotive manufacturing, with Rogers Locomotive & Machine Works at the forefront of that industry, churning out 6,200 trains between 1837 and 1913.

“This building was the final assembly for locomotives,” Garside said. “There would have been a locomotive being built in front of each one of these double doors.”

Gold Spike ceremony of 1869

One wall features a large black-and-white photo of the Golden Spike Ceremony in 1869 when the first transcontinental railroad was completed. One of the trains in the photo was made by Rogers Locomotive & Machine Works. 

The photo is personally meaningful to Garside, as the other train featured in the image was made by Schenectady Locomotive Works, which was based in her hometown.

“We think of the Golden Spike moment as the most important moment for Paterson's locomotive industry in the United States,” she said. “But those moments were happening all over Central and South America with Paterson-built trains.”

The tour took about an hour and ended where the museum began chronologically — with the rock collection. In an alcove where locally quarried minerals such as prehnite and quartz line the walls, Garside flipped a switch, killing the lights.

Suddenly this sleepy rock exhibit came alive. In this shadowy corner, beneath a black light, the stones in one display began to glow fluorescent green and orange. 

“There’s a whole generation that remembers us as the ‘rock museum behind the library,'” Garside said. “We have a pretty great collection.”