Nestled in a community park adjacent to the Henderson Historical Society’s former Universalist Church is an early 19th-century cabin, which provides an immersive example of what life would have been like in the first decades of Henderson’s founding.
The cabin, which was originally located on Ray’s Bay at the southwestern tip of Stony Point, was moved log-by-log to its current location in the early 2000s. It is now outfitted with period-appropriate furniture, tools, toys and other household items and artifacts.
The cabin is available for personal tours during our museum hours. Please visit the museum to gain access to the cabin.
Discovering the Cabin
In 2001 the Henderson Historical Society received an amazing piece of history. Eileen DeLaVergne Pretre of Thomaston, Conn., donated a piece of the home she grew up in on Rays Bay Road in the town of Henderson.
The home had been damaged by a fire in the summer of 2000. The fire was mainly contained to the kitchen area, and the older, main part of the house – a log cabin dating back to the 1820s.
The original cabin was built with squared logs, measuring 18 feet by 24 feet.
A grant from New York Society Council on the Arts aided the society to hire an architect from the Syracuse firm of Crawford & Stearns to examine the structure in the spring of 2002 to assess the history and condition of the cabin; as well as the feasibility of the society’s plan to disassemble the cabin from it’s original location and reassemble next to the society’s museum.
Thanks to the architect’s favorable report, the cabin was labeled and disassembled in the summer of 2002 by Richard LaCrosse of Parish, NY. Mr. LaCrosse, an historical site preserver at Fort Ontario in Oswego, lives in a restored log cabin and has participated in several other log cabin reconstructions.
Henderson Historical Society 