Six Queens historical institutions are featured in the New York Landmarks Conservancy online exhibition showcasing photography and architectural history of 50 sites throughout the city as part of its 50th anniversary yearlong celebration.
- Article written by Carlotta Mohamed, February 2023
Bowne House Included in the New York Landmarks Conservancy’s 50th Anniversary Online Exhibition
In celebration of its 50th Anniversary, the New York Landmarks Conservancy has launched the 50 at 50 Online Exhibition. This exhibition highlights 50 historic sites across New York City that the Conservancy has helped to preserve and protect, including the Bowne House.
We are grateful to the New York Landmarks Conservancy for being a long-standing, pro-bono advisor to the Bowne house on preservation issues and honored to be included in its online, anniversary exhibition.
In honor of the New York Landmarks Conservancy’s 50th Anniversary Celebration, Bowne House will be holding an on-site event 0n June,11 2023. More details forthcoming.
The Museum Association of New York
The Bowne House Archives and the Museum’s designation as a research facility by the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom are the subject of an extensive article in the January 2023 edition of This Month in NYS Museums, a newsletter published by the Museum Association of New York:
"The Strength of Archival Research: How the Bowne House was selected to join the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom”
by Megan Eves, Administrator
Press Release: Bowne House Historical Society Awarded Conservation Treatment Grant
A Black Doll from the Bowne House Historical Society Collection. Image Credit: The Textile Conservation Workshop, South Salem NY, 2022.
The Greater Hudson Heritage Network (GHNN) and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) have awarded Bowne House a generous grant to help conserve an important 19th century Black doll in the museum’s collection.
The doll will be conserved by The Textile Conservation Workshop, a South Salem, New York laboratory providing comprehensive services for the preservation of textiles. Workshop staff have identified 19th century black dolls as too often ignored in the past. They are now seen as evidence of the lived experience of their owners and makers, as well as a reflection of the larger forces of slavery and its legacy. Black dolls offer a unique prism through which to view race, representation and black lives.
American Ancestors Magazine
Bowne House archivist Charlotte Jackson is the author of an article in the Fall 2022 issue of American Ancestors (the quarterly magazine of the New England Historic Genealogical Society) about the museum's archival collections:
“They Being Long Dead, Yet Speak: Three Centuries in the Bowne House Archives"
by Charlotte Jackson, Bowne House Archivist
This article presents an overview of Bowne House’s nine-generation historic documents collection which includes the first mention of the house by John Bowne in 1661 to photos of the Museum's opening ceremony in 1947. Charlotte Jackson’s illustrated article highlights John Bowne's own account of his fight for religious freedom, the letters of Colonial-era women, newly uncovered Quaker records, and documentation of the Bowne and Parsons families' participation in the Underground Railroad.
As Bowne House prepares to digitize its archival holdings in the coming year, we welcome the chance to introduce our rich holdings to a new audience of more than 30,000 readers of American Ancestors, a group of New England Historic Genealogical Society members and donors with common interests in history and heritage.
Press Release: Bowne House Historical Society Awarded National Grant to Research and Map Civil War-Era Underground Railroad Escape Routes in Queens and Long Island
The National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom has awarded Flushing, Queens’ Bowne House Historical Society a significant grant to research, identify and map Underground Railroad networks and escape routes used by freedom-seekers through the relatively unknown “backwaters” of Civil War-era Queens and Long Island.
Mapping the Underground Railroad at the Bowne House: Flushing & Beyond aims to document the museum’s ties to various Underground Railroad networks, the broader Abolition Movement, and other now vanished Black history sites throughout Queens and Long Island.
Press Release: 300 Years of Queens Records Prepare to Go Public: New Grant Awarded to Bowne House Historical Society Will Facilitate Access Back to 1661
On September 29th, Bowne House Historical Society of Flushing, Queens received a substantial grant from the New York Preservation Archive Project in a ceremony on the Bowne House grounds. This grant, part of NYPAP’s Shelby White & Leon Levy Archival Assistance Initiative, will allow Bowne House Historical Society to digitize and share its rich archival collections, which chronicle nine generations of one New York City family from the 17th to the 20th centuries.
The Leon Levy Foundation website features the Bowne House press release announcing the substantial grant to the museum made possible by the Foundation through the New York Preservation Archive Project.
Bowne House in "New York City and the Path to Freedom" Story Map
“New York City and the Path to Freedom”
Landmarks Associated with Abolitionist & Underground Railroad History
Bowne House is thrilled to be featured as one of only two designated landmarks in Queens associated with the Underground Railroad.
Introduction to “New York City and the Path to Freedom” Interactive Story Map:
New York City played an important role in the effort to abolish slavery nationwide, and to assist those seeking to escape it. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission created this interactive story map to bring greater awareness to the city’s abolitionist history through designated landmarks that embody it. Organized by borough, the map documents designated buildings associated with the multiple ways people and institutions engaged with the anti-slavery movement before the Civil War, whether through political and religious activism or by housing freedom seekers as part of Underground Railroad networks. The map also highlights landmarks associated with New York’s free black communities established in the 19th century in the period before nationwide emancipation.
-The New York Landmarks Preservation Commission, February 2022
Thrillist: Where to Learn About NYC's Black History
Bowne House is featured on Thrillist:
Where to Learn About NYC’s Black History
This list of museums, burial grounds, and landmarks across New York City, highlights Bowne House as an Underground Railroad Safe House.
From Thrillist:
Underground Railroad Safe Houses
Flushing, Queens
Flushing, Queens, has been documented as a part of the Underground Railroad—a clandestine network of people, houses, and routes that transported Africans escaping enslavement in the South to freedom in the North—and one of its most important stops was Bowne House. As the oldest building in Queens that was built in 1661, its rich history of three centuries documents the Bowne family’s abolitionist activities and role in anti-slavery movements, and not only is it an official New York City landmark, but it’s also on the National Register of Historic Places. An additional documented historic landmark connected to the Underground Railroad is the Flushing Quaker Meeting House, built in 1694 by John Bowne and other Quakers as a monument to early religious freedom in the colonial United States.- Kemi Ibeh, “Where to Learn About NYC’s Black History,” February 2022
Bowne House Featured in New York Archives Magazine, Winter 2022 Issue
Bowne House Historical Society is featured in New York Archives Magazine’s Winter 2022 issue, in celebration of the museum's induction into the National Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.
Credit: NY Archives Magazine, Winter 2022, www.nyarchivestrust.org
From New York Archives Magazine, Winter 2022:
Congratulations to the Bowne House Historical Society for its induction into the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. The only designation of its kind in Queens, Bowne House joins more than 695 other Network admissions made since the program’s founding in 1998.
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