East Rockaway, an early community on the south shore of Long Island, first appeared as Neare Rockaway in 1665. The Town of Hempstead, at a town meeting held December 28, 1688, granted Joseph Haviland the right to construct a grist mill within one year. If said mill shall be ‘uncapable’ to grind in one year, then ‘streame and Land is to reterne to ye towne againe.’ The Haviland Grist Mill was built in 1689 and became the center of the social, economic and political life of the area. East Rockaway prospered as a seaport with packet boats carrying oyster and farm produce to New York City and lumber and grain farther north. It also developed an early but short lived trans-Atlantic trade. East Rockaway had several churches, schools and an early post office and library.
Near Rockaway at one time included East Rockaway, Lynbrook and Oceanside but that changed when East Rockaway was incorporated in 1900 by village fathers who maintained an anathema to taxation and who controlled all aspects of the village from the fire department, grain and shipping industries, religion and education.

Since it was founded in 1821, the town of Sardinia, NY, has remained a small, tightly knit rural community containing a mix of family farms and commuting laborers. Although rural, Sardinians have never been reluctant to adopt popular trends that often originated in the more populated cities. From the years 1900 to 1920, people across America witnessed a stunning advance in technology and improvements in quality of life. It was also a relatively prosperous time, and people were slowly learning how to have some fun and enjoy life. Taking pictures of those enjoyable and important things in life seemed to be the perfect way to capture and remember them. Turning those pictures into postcards allowed them to share their memories with friends and family who lived far away. Sardinia was no different, and this collection of postcard images carried a significant importance to not only the people who created them, but also to those who live there now and those who may be seeking a link to their ancestors who lived there long ago.
Postcards made from photographs were very popular in the early 1900s. They were relatively cheap to have made and durable enough to store nicely in albums or send through the mail. Postcards also offered a convenient way to have multiple copies of a favorite image made up and distributed to family and friends. Deciding which picture to make into a postcard was a careful process. Someone actually took the time to select the perfect picture, take it to Ed Miller's store in Sardinia Village, pay him to package it, and mail it to Germany to be reproduced onto a durable postcard. Often the subject in the photo was not very interesting or colorful to the uninformed or unrelated, but did represent something important to the person who took it and wanted it copied. Views of store fronts, main streets, churches, trains, parades, automobiles, the circus, people in groups, houses, family members, kids, etc., tell us these things held some value and were a big part of life in tiny Sardinia at the turn of the 20th century.
Back then, picking a photo important enough to be turned into a postcard would be similar to today's practice of posting a favorite picture to social media. You don't just pick any old picture—it's a careful selection process which says the owner is proud of this image, and it means something to him or her. Pride in town, pride in family, pride in modernity, pride in religion, pride in worldliness, were and are uniquely human traits that shine through, whether in the black and white flatness of yesterday or the brilliant three-dimensional colors of today. Perhaps this quaint collection of historic postcards from Sardinia helps in a small way to portray and preserve that fundamental pride of place for which everyone longs.

Exhibition "Historic Paintings Unwrapped:" The History Center has over 200 paintings in its collection. Most have not been seen in a very, very long time and are stored in crates and other containers. In October 2009, the History Center brought the crates, a few at a time, into the gallery, to open them up and exhibit the pictures for all to see. Each painting was on display for about a month, and the entire exhibition lasted until the end of April 2010. As we hangDuring The exhibtion was also an oppotunity to evaluate each piece; they were assessed for condition, retention, future storage, and improved record-keeping.

Hempstead is a village located in the town of Hempstead, Nassau County, NY. In the spring of 1644, thirty to forty families left Stamford, Connecticut, crossed Long Island Sound, landed in Hempstead Harbor and eventually made their way to the present site of the village of Hempstead where they began their English settlement within Dutch-controlled New Netherland. During the American Revolution, Hempstead was a center of British sympathizers. In the 19th century Hempstead became increasingly important as a trading center for Long Island. Early Long Islanders made their living in agriculture or from the sea. Hempstead, with its central location, became the marketplace for the outlying rural farming communities.

Hiram S. Wilson was born in 1815 to Henry and Nancy Wilson. He married Elizabeth Wickes in 1839 in Sandy Hill (now Hudson Falls), New York. They had seven children. Before the outbreak of the Civil War, the Wilson family moved to Bolton, NY where Wilson was the proprietor of the Mohican House, the oldest hotel in the town. He enlisted in the United Sates Military on November 1, 1861 and was commissioned as captain in Company H of the 93rd New York Voluntary Infantry. His regiment was present at the Peninsula Campaign, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Wilderness Campaign, and Cold Harbor. Wilson died suddenly on March 24, 1864 of erysipelas while stationed in New York City. At the time, he was in command of a detachment of troops who were responsible for escorting new conscripts to the seat of war. He was buried in the Oakwood Cemetery in Troy, NY.

In Highland Hospital 1889-1940, turn of the century photographs and postcards reflect the sense of the Rochester community and the advancement of healthcare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Highland Hospital first opened in 1889 as Hahnemann Hospital, one of the first homeopathic hospitals in the United States. The Hospital officially became known as Highland Hospital in 1921. The hospital has continued to grow to meet the needs of the Rochester community and offer state-of-the-art medical care.

During the 1920's, many of the nursing students at Highland Hospital School of Nursing in Rochester, N.Y. created scrapbooks. Several of these scrapbooks were donated to the Highland Hospital Archives and we've digitized three of them to make them accessible to the public. Highland Hospital School of Nursing Scrapbooks gives a delightful glimpse into the lives of these students and their personal experiences at Highland.

Mostly formal and often posed, these black and white images offer a taste of hospital life during that decade. It was hospital business as usual, with the addition of new wartime measures. Day-to-day scenes such as a doctor reviewing x-ray films with a Dictaphone, and nurses assisting a patient in an oxygen tent are juxtaposed with the then-familiar sight of an Air Raid Warden's Post furnished with fire-fighting equipment.