Meadowlands Museum facts for kids
The Meadowlands Museum is a special place in Rutherford, New Jersey, where you can travel back in time! It opened in 1961 to save and share interesting objects from the history of Rutherford and the nearby New Jersey Meadowlands region.
How the Museum Began
The museum was started by a group of parents from the local Parent-Teacher Association. They wanted to create a place to keep important historical items. Their first collections included things from natural history, like local minerals, and artifacts from the Native American tribes who first lived in the area.
At first, the museum was just one room in Rutherford's Sylvan School. It was called the Sylvan School Museum and was open for students to visit. By the late 1960s, the school needed the classroom back. The museum moved to an office building and was renamed the Rutherford Museum.
In 1974, the museum found its permanent home. It bought the historic Yereance-Berry House. This house is very old, with most of it built in the early 1800s. It's so important that it's on the National Register of Historic Places. An interesting fact is that a part of the house was removed in the 1930s to make way for a new road!
A Look Inside the Museum Today
The main goal of the museum is to teach people about the area's history. It does this through fun educational programs and by showing its collection of historical items.
The museum has several permanent exhibits that you can explore:
- An Antique Toy Room: Step into a world before video games! This room is filled with toys from the 1800s and early 1900s.
- Rocks and Minerals: Discover amazing local rocks. Some of them are even fluorescent, which means they glow under a special light!
- A Pre-Electric Kitchen: See what a kitchen looked like in the early 1900s, before homes had electricity. Imagine cooking without a microwave or refrigerator.
- The "Homespun" Room: This room shows items from the early to mid-1800s. You can see things that people made by hand at home, like clothes on spinning wheels and old-fashioned dishes.
The museum also celebrates the life of William Carlos Williams, a famous poet who was from Bergen County.
Just like when it first started, the museum is a popular destination for school field trips, helping a new generation of kids learn about local history.
