Cattaraugus County Museum

Due to possible staff exposure to COVID-19, the museum will remain closed until we are certain there is no risk to visitors. Feel free to send a message if you have questions or need information; we will try to assist as much as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to reopen soon.

The Cattaraugus County Museum and Research library is pleased to announce the opening of its new display featuring several previously unexhibited artifacts from the Eber Russell collection of Native American artifacts. Eber Russell was born in 1881 in Perrysburg, and by the age of 8 was already an enthusiastic collector of Native American artifacts. Over the years, his collection grew to several thousand specimens largely local in origin, but also coming from as far afield ...as California and the Pacific Northwest. He became a recognized authority in this field, as well as Viking history, and spoke on the topic for many area audiences. Late in life Russell became an adopted member of the Wolf Clan of the Seneca Nation. In 1957, Mr. Russell sold a large portion of his collection to the Cattaraugus County Museum, at that time located in Little Valley, for the sum of $1,000. While several items from the collection have been permanently on display since that time, many more have been in storage due to lack of display space as well as imprecise identification of a multitude of stone tools and projectile points. In 2014, a group of archeologists and archaeology students from the University of Buffalo, led by Dr. Douglas Perrelli, director of the Archeological Survey, identified and catalogued several hundred of these previously undisplayed artifacts. The museum is excited to finally be able to display, with more precise identification, several of these items.

The Cattaraugus County Museum and Research Library announces with regret that due to the continued concern over public gatherings and the spread of COVID-19, we will be cancelling the remainder of our Summer at the Stone House event series for 2020. This includes programs that were scheduled for Aug. 13 and 27. We are hopeful that circumstances will allow us to resume our summer special event programming in 2021. In the meantime, the museum has reopened and it and the researc...h library are available to visitors. Standard social distancing protocols remain in place. Consider paying us a visit!

Tune in in less that 30 minutes for Dave Ruch hosting a program on traditional music of New York State!

In place of Dave Ruch's annual visit to the "Summer at the Stone House" concert series in Machias NY, we've asked him to present a program "live" on Facebook. Enjoy from wherever you are, and feel free to interact with Dave in the Comments section below.

On Thursday I'll be sharing some of the fruits of my research into the old music our ancestors here in NYS played and sang for their own entertainment before th...ey had radios and record players. The show will be live on the Cattaraugus County Museum page at 7pm ET. So far I've got a song from the War of 1812 that was kept in a Wyoming County diary for almost a century before it was uncovered, a Gold Rush song as sung in the Adirondack lumberwoods, some Irish-inflected music from the canal, a few tunes that were played for dancing at Old Fort Niagara 1804-1812, music from the repertoire of an 80-90 year old woodsman (recorded 1939-1949) and some other oddities and surprises...if there's anything else YOU would like to hear, by all means let me know. This would have been my fifth consecutive summer traveling down to the Stone House Museum in Machias to play for their history-minded summer concert series, so we'll gather around the digital hearth instead and make the best of things! Join me if you can. Thursday July 23 at 7pm. Event invitation here - NYS Traditional Music