History Center Displays (north wall I)

On the north wall, the first two displays are Gilboa Village and The Reservoir.

Gilboa Village

When you’re facing north (away from Route 990V), the first bay coming into our History Center room is dedicated to the village of Gilboa in the 1910s. This is  one of the three areas in the museum most popular with our patrons (the other two being natural science and the construction of the reservoir). 

In the village, the main display is a very well developed description of aspects of village at that time. It is a delightful mix of the more formal Board of Water Supply photographs and pictures from personal family archives.  That area may be revised at some point, but it is  basically a constant for the museum. 

There is a new display on the wall to the right of that area that illustrates the disaster fires could wreak in a village in 1890, and defining the left side of the village area is a case displaying artifacts of that community before the reservoir.

Our presentation of Gilboa Village is our ideal for permanent topics of Gilboa Museum and the Nicholas J. Juried History Center: the theme will be interesting and well developed, and with interesting sidebar materials to keep returning patrons interested in what is new.

Across the room  on the research table is a black box containing the tax maps and property rolls of that time, followed by our collection of photographs of properties in the village. These are the Board of Water Supply photographs that were used in establishing repayment costs for property under eminent domain.

As a sidebar on Nick Juried: Nick is an avid stamp collector and has written several articles and papers on specific post offices and periods. However, we have not found examples for him. If you have old  postcards or envelopes relating to Gilboa, please let us know so we can try to fill this gap in our collection.

The Reservoir

Board of Water Supply Books

On the shelves in The Reservoir section of the center is a collection of the annual reports from the Board of Water Supply for 1904-1927. These annual diaries chronologically report all activities of the BWS and have a lot of photographs.

We have scanned all these books and can supply DVDs of them on request (we have not yet made professional masters and  created a commercial product).

One major deficiency of these books: they have a lot of financial tables printed on very thin paper and then folded and tabbed into place in the books. This paper is very fragile and we have been afraid of scanning  them: the CDs do not have the financial information, and we cannot let these books be used or damaged.

The scans of these books in pictures are used in this display and in the looseleaf blinders on the shelves.

Looseleaf binders

The five looseleaf binders were originally filled purely with information from the BWS annual reports.

Using our scans, we have taken all relevant information out of  the BWS reports topically and arranged it in these binders under five headings:

• Why Gilboa: Information from the Board of Water Supply reports relating to the selection of Gilboa as the site for the projected Schoharie Reservoir, and we are integrating it with information from David  Hammack’s Power and Society: Greater New York at the turn-of-the-century.
• Infrastructure: The planning and construction needed before the actual building of the dam and tunnel could be started. 
• Shandaken Tunnel: The Shandaken tunnel, a little over 18 miles in length to gravity feed water from the Schoharie reservoir to the Esopus Creek
• Dam Construction:  construction of the dam did not start until 2019,  giving the infrastructure and tunnel a two-year head start. This section will also cover the finishing work through 1927
• Dam Maintenance, 1927-2000
• Dam Restoration, 2000-

These volumes are all in infancy,  and will have Board of Water Supply photographs integrated with local stories and photographs. They will eventually be published by the  Gilboa Historical Society Press.

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