Approved Shoring Plan and More!
Great news! The Town has received approval of the shoring plan from NY State! The Request For Proposal will go out on Monday, 11/23/2020, to qualified construction firms to do the work. This RFP must be open for 3 weeks. Once the Town receives the bids, they will be reviewed by the Planning Department, a choice of firm will be made and then the Town Board will pass a resolution authorizing the work to begin. Weather permitting, the work could begin either at the end of December or the beginning of January!
At the same time as the shoring work RFP is issued, there will also be another RFP to hire the architect to design the full restoration of the house. The architectural firm chosen will work with museum consultants to create not only the physical, structural work to be completed but also to consider how each room will be used to exhibit and teach the wonderful history of this house!
Progress continues as the Friends work with the Town to raise money for the restoration of Odell House Rochambeau Headquarters. Our membership and donor numbers are growing as is interest in our project from throughout Westchester and the United States. As a prime location on the Washington Rochambeau Revolutionary Route, we are participating in the national, state and county plans to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Revolutionary War. As events are held, they are posted on our Facebook page and here on the website. We can’t wait to hold our first event in 2021!
Meanwhile, the Friends are preparing the house for the beginning of the physical work. With the agreement of the SAR, we moved 16 cartons of documents and numerous framed photographs from the storage containers on the property to safe keeping in the archives of the Westchester County Historical Society. This is a modern, climate controlled archive, protected from fire and other damage. We are very grateful to Susanne Pandich, director of WCHS and Pat Raftery, librarian, for allowing the collection to be there. Marc Cheshire of the Scarsdale Historical Society participated in the move and SHS paid for the new archival boxes to house the collection. Board members Susan and David Seal, Dan Weinfeld and Chris Rubeo have begun to sort the letters, legal documents and photos and to scan the most important ones. And Chris, who lives in California, while visiting in Hawthorne, scanned 1100 slides found in the container. These images are vintage photos of farm life in Westchester, the Odell family from the mid 19th century up to the end of the 20th and more. Thank you, Chris!
Last week, a crew from the Greenburgh Parks Department removed a series of models of Odell farm outbuildings to safe keeping. These are wooden models, made to scale of the cattle barn, hay barn, stable and more made by Roland Odell in the 1970’s and 80’s. We will be able to display them during events at the house and at Hartsbrook Park and use them to explain what it looked like before all the houses around it were built.
During the next few weeks, one of the old storage containers will be removed from the property. In its place will go a new container, funded by the Friends with the help of a generous grant from a small, local, family foundation. The contents of the house will be inventoried and photographed as they are moved from the house into the new container. They will be safely housed there while restoration work moves forward. This full, carefully created inventory of the furniture, the artifacts and the documents will be a key element for the planning of the Museum. The rich history of the house will be told in our new Museum with exhibits created from this wonderful treasure trove!
There is more progress to come soon! If you haven't joined us yet, please come on board!