The Batavia Depot Museum will be celebrating 50 years this spring and summer with a special throwback effort that will include the sounds and sights of the 1970s.
According to a press release from the Batavia Park District, the 50-year birthday celebration will include “the groovy days of 8-tracks, corduroy and the Bee Gees” with a new exhibit celebrating a half-century of “Batavia’s landmark home for history.”
The release notes that the exhibit, set to open March 1, will include stories from the many Batavia residents that had a hand in making the museum a reality.
“This exhibit will tell their stories through photographs, recollections, original videos and even some tools used in the restoration of the old depot,” the release said.
Batavia Depot Museum Director Kate Garrett said that the exhibit – scheduled to run through July 20 – has been more than two years in the making.
“We started doing work on this over two years ago, mostly background and research at first and doing planning and long-range visioning, and then last year really digging deep into the records and research and putting together the exhibit itself,” she said. “We’ve been collecting artifacts for this exhibit, really, since 1975 when we opened. A lot of what is in the exhibit is what was on display when we very first opened.”
Garrett said visitors will see some cool things in the next few months while visiting the museum.
“We’ve got some amazing things and a display that really sort of puts people back in time into the 1970s when the museum first opened,” she said. “Toys and games and pop culture items from 1975. We’ve got the shovel that first broke ground at the depot’s current location and to go with that the home movie made by Walter Kauth in 1975 of the groundbreaking so you can see the shovel and you can go downstairs to our 1970s den and watch a home video.”
While Garrett said visitors will not actually see a tribute to the Bee Gees or an 8-track machine, “our family den component of our exhibit includes being able to watch a video of classic commercials from the 1970s.”
“We’ve also got some LPs – records from the ’70s – on display in a case and hopefully people feel like they are traveling back in time a little bit,” she said.
The Batavia Depot Museum is located at 155 Houston St. in Batavia. (David Sharos / For The Beacon-News)
Garrett said some interesting discoveries were made as the exhibit was being put together.
“The thing that surprised me the most – even though it shouldn’t have – was how much the local community contributed to making the museum happen in the first place,” she said. “We have a town of close to 30,000 people, and we see about 4,000 people a year here. When the museum was originally opened – the percentage of people who donated either time or funds or artifacts – it was a huge percentage of Batavia who contributed to make this happen in the first place and set up something for further generations.”
Garrett said a few dozen artifacts will be on display as the museum only has about 100 square feet of exhibit space, adding that, “We only show the best stuff.”
The exhibit includes cases with original artifacts as well as exhibit panels that have photographs and quotes and reproductions of paper objects.
The lower level of the museum sports the 1975 family den which Garrett said “is a more immersive space.”
“I hope people who see this come away with a sense of how something this small can have such a huge impact,” she said. “Fifty years is a long time for any organization to be around, and we’ve made a huge impact on the community in that time. It really just started out with a few people sitting around a dining room table and saying, ‘We don’t want to lose this, we want to make sure it sticks around.’ This is citizen motivated. People did it.
“The only reason we’ve been here for 50 years is because people were invested in the beginning and got other people excited about it,” Garrett added. “We’ve been a volunteer-led organization for a long time. We’re part of the park district now and the taxpayers support us and fund us but it would not happen without all these people supporting us.”
The museum is at 155 Houston St. in Batavia. Opening for the season on March 1, it will be open from 2 to 4 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.
For more information, call 630-406-5274 or go to www.bataviaparks.org/batavia-depot-museum.
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
