About the Historical Society of Rockland County
The Historical Society of Rockland County was formed in 1965 by merging two older groups, the Rockland County Society of the early twentieth century and the Tappan Zee Historical Society, founded in 1954. The Tappan Zee society had already launched South of the Mountains, the quarterly that remains the society's flagship publication, with its first issue in 1957. For its first years the merged society worked out of an eighteenth-century sandstone house on Kings Highway in Orangeburg, lent rent-free by its owner Irving Maidman.
In 1970 the society bought the Jacob Blauvelt House, its farm outbuildings, and four acres at 20 Zukor Road in New City from the Gibbons family, descendants of the Blauvelts who had built the house and farmed the land. The two-story vernacular brick farmhouse dates to 1832, and the family lived on the property until 1970. Between 1972 and 1975 the society restored the house along with the barn, carriage house, and blacksmith shop while still running its Orangeburg museum; ground was broken for a fireproof museum beside the farmhouse in 1974, the cornerstone was laid in February 1975, and the History Center was dedicated in July 1977.
The 7,200-square-foot History Center holds two galleries with 2,170 square feet of exhibition space, a museum shop, a library, collections storage, and a lower-level Community Room for programs; the main level and a separate ground-floor entrance are ADA accessible, and the Town of Clarkstown provides three adjoining acres for parking. The society also runs a historical marker program, presents annual Historic Preservation Merit Awards, publishes the podcast Crossroads of Rockland History, and leads Historic Homes and Landmarks Tours.
Collections and Research Services
The society is the principal repository for original documents and artifacts relating to Rockland County and the lower Hudson Valley. Its collection of roughly 3,650 objects runs from the early 1700s to the present and includes furnishings original to the Blauvelt family, a rare Rockland County kas of about 1705-1715, coverlets woven by David Haring around 1834, a Dutch plow of about 1790, the entire contents of the Eckerson blacksmith and wheelwright shop from Spring Valley, Haverstraw bricks and ice-harvesting tools, and paintings by J. W. Hill, William Henry Bartlett, and Henry Varnum Poor. Recent collecting has added material from the county's Haitian, Latino, and Ramapough Lenape communities and an archive on Pierre Bernard's Clarkstown Country Club.
For genealogists and house historians the society offers a library and archives used by appointment. Email the senior historian at historian@rocklandhistory.org with the nature of your request one to two weeks ahead; most research appointments are scheduled Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday mornings between 10 a.m. and noon, and materials are pulled in advance from a Special Collections Request form. Research is a fee-based service at $20 per hour for non-members and $10 for members, with copies at 25 cents or 10 cents per page; the staff will also handle requests by mail, phone, or email, allowing two weeks, and will refer you elsewhere free of charge if they cannot help. Online, the society provides searchable databases of historic postcards, photographs, and maps, and the 1957-2013 run of South of the Mountains is digitized on the New York Heritage portal. See our guides to dating a house and finding old photographs for how to use collections like these.
Planning Your Visit
The History Center at 20 Zukor Road is open for administrative business Wednesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., year-round. The 2026 exhibition, Rockland in the Revolution: A 250th Anniversary Exploration, is open Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m., and docent-guided tours of the Jacob Blauvelt House run Sunday afternoons at 1, 2, and 3 p.m. from May 3 through October 25, 2026. Admission for exhibitions and tours is not posted online, so check rocklandhistory.org or call (845) 634-9629 before visiting. From the Palisades Parkway take Exit 11 to New Hempstead Road, then Main Street; the society's lot is the first right past the three-way stop. Nearby county societies in our directory include the Orange County Historical Society at Arden and the Dutchess County Historical Society in Rhinebeck.
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