So I mentioned before, I was in Pittsfield with a cabin and a barn in 1993. And in 1996, I was thinking about building a house on the property in Pittsfield. And my wife, who was restoring an 1850s house on Long Island when we had met teaching on Long Island, she said, “Well, let’s look at houses first.” Because I drew up plans for a house. It was very substantial. I talked to some builders, some in Norwich actually, and it was a lot of money, especially for then, for 1996 money. So she said, “Let’s look at houses.”
And when we came here, it was fairly depressed, New Berlin and even Norwich, a lot of these towns and little villages around fairly depressed. So houses were going pretty cheap and we ended up buying an 1896 Victorian house, eleven room house in the village of New Berlin, and for a fraction of what I would’ve paid to build. And we were very happy and still am. It’s a great beautiful house that was in original condition. It was built by a single woman from a very wealthy family here people know from history too. It’s called the Beardsley family. The great-aunt had built this house herself. She was a single woman, which was kind of unique for the times. Lived there 30 years and then sold it to another single woman. So for 60 years, that house just had two women living in it. Probably goes for why the woodwork and everything is as beautiful as it still is.
And yeah, it’s right in the village so you can walk to everything and it’s just a wonderful place to live. The village has changed a lot since 1996. So many people have come up, especially from downstate. After 9/11, there was an influx of people looking to get out of the city, understandably and we’ve had people contacting us because of the property that we still had in Pittsfield, but we didn’t want to sell it. But I understand why they needed to get out of New York. It was really tough down there.
So that’s the village life. And then like most villages, they have a library. And I am a former teacher, so of course I had to go to the library and check it out. And eventually, I got pulled into that and I’ve been the president of the board of directors for over 10 years now of the New Berlin Library and Museum, which is right in the village. And it’s a fabulous institution. It’s the oldest house in the village, which is late 1700s and it was deeded from the people that owned it to be forever a library, which was a wonderful thing. So we always have it. We always will have it, and that can’t be changed.
And there’s a museum downstairs that a lot of people don’t realize or haven’t really utilized, which is a shame. Most of it’s all donated collection. Everything from a dinosaur bone, fossil to all throughout the wars from the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I to we have uniforms. Some people had given us weapons from that time period, medals from their ancestors. Besides all kinds of artifacts that were a lot indigenous to New Berlin and Chenango County. Old wheelchairs and sewing machines, early typewriters. It’s actually packed. There’s three full rooms down there of artifacts, and it’s just a fascinating little museum.
Our library is always free, the museum is free. We’re actually in an associate library, which is slightly different than a public library. Gives us a little more autonomy of what we can do. We don’t have as strict regulations and money situations that other libraries have to deal with. So that was a really cool thing. It still is. So it’s a very interesting place to be part of because there’s always stuff going on. We offer so many programs every year. Right now we have an adult painting program and we have a kids program. Later on in the summer, we have a program where the school gets involved and they supply breakfast and lunch for the kids. So they come to the library and they have free food, which is a great thing to do for these kids. And it’s just a fabulous, very busy little place, and I’m really happy to be part of it.
I taught social studies. All of everything down there interests me. The best thing is the feel of community. New Berlin is a very small village and the library has become the focal point of the village. The people that we have there, our director and our employees, they’re just wonderfully informed, educated people. So any question that comes in about anything from the time of day to wanting the latest book on the New York Times seller list, we get the call and people come in. So it’s really a hub.
We have a community room downstairs that we completely redid. So now it has couches. We have a stage. I have a friend that donated a piano. So we do shows down there as well. We also do shows in the month of August every year. They’re free up in the park in New Berlin. They’re called the Perkins Concert series. Perkins is a family that was here years and years ago, and two generations ago, one of the family members, he was on the board of the library going way back. So the descendants, there’s a daughter and a son, one lives near Boston, the other’s in Florida, they donate money every year just for us to put on these shows. So we bring in different bands and we bring a zoomobile in with live animals for the kids. Ice cream. One of the shows always donates ice cream so we could give ice cream to everyone who shows up.
And those park shows have grown from 10 to 20 people to a full park. They’ve become very popular and it’s a very cool thing to do. It’s every Wednesday night from 6:00 to 7:00 in August of every year.
