When the Greenwich Historical Society puts on the Ritz to celebrate its 90th anniversary Oct. 1 at an El Morocco-style gala at the private Easterly estate, it will also be saluting nine decades of helping the town”™s industries grow. (Make that officially 91 years. The gala was delayed by the pandemic.)
“People who move into the area want to know more about their homes, so we help them do research,” says Debra L. Mecky, Ph.D., the society”™s Debra L. Mecky executive director and CEO. “Realtors often come in. We have fabulous records on buildings, collected throughout the 20th century.”
Then there”™s the ancestry.com crowd, representative of the genealogy trend. While much of your family”™s past can be deduced from public records online, Mecky notes that “there are records in local collections that are not publicly available.”
Indeed, educating the public is one of the society”™s missions, beginning with Greenwich”™s youngest residents as the historical society offers programs for all the town”™s schools, including partnerships with its less advantaged Title I schools.
But perhaps the societyӪs biggest contribution to Greenwich commerce is the role it plays in tourism, averaging 14,000 visitors a year pre-Covid and even 12,700 last year to a 2.5-acre campus, threaded by historic gardens, that includes the 18th through 19th-century Bush-Holley House, a National Historic Landmark; the Bush Storehouse; the Vanderbilt Education Center; and the $13.5 million, 10,000-square-foot museum and archives, designed by David Scott Parker Architects. This 2018 addition is connected to TobyӪs Tavern (1805), which fittingly houses a gift shop and caf̩ where Mecky talks with Westfair. There she paints a portrait of a local history rich in commerce.
It centers on the Bush-Holley House, which started out in 1728 to 1730 as place to load Connecticut produce bound for New York City and unload manufactured goods from there. In 1738, Justus Bush (originally Bosch), a wealthy Dutch-born farmer and Greenwich selectman, purchased the main saltbox-style house, which would be occupied by son David, a mill owner. He expanded the home to accommodate a burgeoning household that included 15 enslaved people, who slept in the attic amid drying herbs. (Like many historic sites, including Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, the house has been reinterpreted to consider the contributions of enslaved Africans to local mills, trade and homesteads.)
When David”™s son Justus Luke took over, he added a storehouse that would later serve as the Coc Cob Post Office and today the historical society”™s administrative offices.
A new enterprise awaited when the house passed from the Bush family in 1848. Edward and Josephine Holley ran it as a boardinghouse for artists and writers, beginning in 1882, handing it off to daughter Constant when she married artist Elmer McCrae in 1900. The Holleys”™ and McCrae”™s roles can”™t be understated as their commercial efforts nourished the Cos Cob Art Colony, Connecticut”™s first art colony and a hotbed of American Impressionism, a more muscular, later version of its French cousin. Among the colony”™s members was John Henry Twachtman, the subject of “Life and Art: The Greenwich Paintings of John Henry Twachtman,” at the society Oct. 19 through Jan. 22. Exhibits like this are part of the local tourist industry as are the society”™s “Discover Greenwich” walking tours, lectures, workshops, demonstrations and community activities.
In 1957, the widowed Constant sold the house to the Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich, which had been established in 1931 at the Perrot Memorial Library in Old Greenwich. The house became a National Historic Landmark in 1991, with the society gaining accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums in 2005. Today, the Greenwich Historical Society has 20 employees and a $2 million operating budget, with more than 90% of its support coming from fundraising events, individual donations and admissions. Less than 10% comes from grants and sponsorships. The society receives no money from the town or the state.
So self-sufficient is the society that its Oct. 1 gala is already sold out.
Evoking the blue zebra-printed glamour of El Morocco, a Manhattan nightclub where movie stars twinkled in the 1930s through ”™50s, the gala underscores another Greenwich industry of the past.
Says Mecky: “El Morocco was founded (as a speakeasy) in 1931, the same year as the historical society. While it was most likely a destination for elite Greenwich residents, Greenwich itself was home to more speakeasies and ”˜rum holes”™ than any other town in Connecticut, according to the historical society”™s publication”¯”˜Greenwich Before 2000.”™”
Just another way in which Greenwich has been enterprising.
For more, visit greenwichhistory.org.
