The present Town Historian, Robert Hughes, has his offices in the old library...
Robert is
most interested in our reunion
activities, and has thoughtfully penned
the following note to all of us...
He can be reached via e-mail at:
2/12/03:
cf photos below
To: The Huntington High School Class of 1956
From: Robert C. Hughes, Town Historian
Date: January 6, 2003
Re: 50th Reunion
This year Huntington will celebrate its 350th anniversary. You may
remember the 300th anniversary when you were in high school. Fifty years
before that,
the town had a big celebration for its 250th anniversary (the President even
came to that one!). Anniversaries are naturally a time to look back and in
previous celebrations, the Town looked to its colonial past and into the
nineteenth century. Unfortunately, that means that not too much has been
written about Huntington in the twentieth century.
That’s why I would like to ask for help from the class of ’56 as you prepare for your 50th reunion. You were here before Huntington changed into the built-up suburban community it is today. You remember when the Fire Department was on Main Street. You remember when there was a thriving village called Huntington Station. You remember when there were farms in Huntington. You remember when there was no Walt Whitman Mall. You remember so many things that are gone and we need your help in recording those memories.
I congratulate you for getting such an early start on your reunion planning.
I hope that when looking back and collecting photographs and stories for
the reunion, you will share those memories of mid-twentieth century Huntington
with present and future generations of the Town. For my part, I will help
you as much as I can, but I know that you are now the teachers.
A lawyer by training, Robert Hughes lives in Cold Spring with his wife (also an attorney) and children.
He is a past President of the Huntington Historical Society.
Covering a lot of historical ground, he is particularly interested in the history of the 20th century, about which not a lot has been captured, and well may be lost as we all pass...your memories and photos matter to him...
...recall that the door behind Robert leads through a cupboard-lined corridor to the librarian's office, which occupies the "turret" portion of the building facing Main...the entrance to the building is behind Robert and to the left out of sight...
The stacks are gone, as well as the narrow steel steps that curled up the right side of bay in front to the upper stacks...
I found I could still remember the spot on an upper wall where all the Zane Grey books I read as a little boy were kept...
...the photo on the wall behind his head is of a late-thirties (guess) senior class on it's annual trip to Washington...
...the building will shortly undergo some needed maintenance...Note that the civil war cannon outside the building was a gift of the Federal Government on the town's 250th anniversary
...it's a teeny little place now,
but when we were kids it seemed like the
Library of Congress...
