Stratford Historical Society and Museum

News from the Stratford Historical Society and Museum, in Stratford, Gippsland, Victoria. We are open Tuesdays from 10am to 3pm, and the fourth Sunday of the month from 2pm to 4pm. Our postal address is P.O. Box 145, Stratford, 3862.

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Location: Victoria, Australia

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Sorting the Archives / Chairs

Work on Tuesdays has shifted away from cataloguing objects, to sorting the archives material. This is much easier in our nice, well-set-out back room.

Various people have taken on cataloguing and sorting photographs, published books, newsletters and the documents. The maps have also been sorted, but we are still looking for a Map Curator to work on Tuesdays. But at least we can now find our parish maps.

Out in the Museum proper, one of the exhibitions that we have is Chairs from the Collection. And a little bit of thought is still occurring about what each sort of chair can be called. One breakthrough is to know that Captain's Chairs, for example, belong in the Windsor Chair group (well, we knew they weren't Bentwoods, for example).

Here are a couple from the Collection:

P00407

The one above is a Windsor Chair. The one below is a Captain's Chair.

P00277

And the one below is a rather nice Bentwood Chair, where the seat has worn out and been replaced with a commercially available wooden panel.

P00396

All in all, the more you get into them, the more fascinating chairs can be.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Dating the Post Box

P00895

This post box has been in the collection for some time, and we are trying to date it. So this picture has been posted for Laurie.

There is a suggestion it may have come from the Briagolong Railway Station, which would have closed in the mid 1950s, I think. And passenger services closed well before that time - the 1950s were goods trains only, with timber from the mill????

There are some mail closure times on the door, but they don't really help.

Any ideas, Laurie?????