Educator Walter Elwood founded the Walter Elwood Museum in 1939 as a collection of teaching artifacts for the Greater Amsterdam School District in the Mohawk Valley Region. By 1981, the collection, which had become a repository for local history, was too large for the district to maintain. The Mohawk Valley Heritage Association (MVHA) took over responsibility for the collection, and in 2009 the museum moved to the 18th-century Guy Park Manor on the banks of the Mohawk River. The decision to move the community’s collective memory did not take into account the mansion’s location on the banks of the Erie Canal.¹ Just two years after the move, Hurricane Irene and dam gate malfunctions on the Erie Canal caused disastrous flooding in the museum, destroying many of the artifacts on the first floor and causing serious structural damage to the building. Volunteers and contract workers moved in and cleaned the remaining artifacts. In 2013, with Federal Emergency Management Agency funds and a generous donation from a local medical doctor, the MVHA purchased the former Sanford Carpet Mill building and relocated 141 feet above their former home on the water. About half of the mill’s 100,000 square feet is museum space; the rest is rented out for income.² While the museum successfully replaced its facility, irreplaceable collections have been lost.

Like many local museums in New York State, the Walter Elwood Museum has a small number of paid staff and lacks an endowment, relying instead on volunteers and donors. It has one paid full-time and two part-time staff members for facilities and secretarial duties. The institution relies on a large corps of volunteers to care for collections and staff the museum, aided by a city summer youth program. That youth program, however, is the only regular funding that the museum receives from either the city or the county. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the museum served 5000–7000 people annually through public museum visits, programs for the public and for schools, and children’s summer camps.