10/24/2026
What's next?
With the 2026 tour season officially over, we are looking ahead to 2027. A whole new slate of lectures, tours, living history, and events is coming together, but one of the most exciting additions just rolled on site this week!
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a multipurpose, historically-sympathetic, auxiliary interpretive structure! That maybe doesn't roll off the tongue as smoothly at the Superman tagline, but we're still excited.
You may have seen this building at The Great New York State Fair last Summer, where it was furnished as a 1760s trade house as part of NY State Parks & Historic Sites interpretation. This structure represents the numerous semi-permanent sort of clapboard-and-shingle work structures that would have been common across the Hall property in the 1760s and 1770s. The interior can be adapted to interpret a wide variety of topics, from the fur trade to traditional craft skills to the varied living spaces of the people enslaved at the property 250 years ago. It will become a regular feature at our events and for pop-up living history, as well as enabling us to accommodate larger school group requests regardless of weather.
Images
Top: The pine clapboards and iron hardware of the interpretive shed arriving by (admittedly ahistoric) flatbed truck stands out beautifully against the blue October sky and the feathery green needles of the sunlit white pine tree near the parking lot.
Bottom: Interpretive Programs Assistant Ian Mumpton in 18th century garb talking about the relationship between the sugar/slave trade and the fur/textile trade in the structure at the State Fair this past summer, displaying examples of a conical sugar loaf, and dark blue, bright green, and rare purple woolen fabric called stroud.
