NT History Museum Gets a Little Help From Friends at Micro-Ingram

A harp made by the Rudolph Wurlitzer Co, of NT.

The North Tonawanda History Museum got a little help last Friday thanks to the United Way of Buffalo & Erie County.

Seven stalwart volunteers from Ingram-Micro in Amherst came to the museum at 54 Webster St. and helped the "old timers" at the museum rearrange exhibits and do other needful projects.

"Since all of our museum volunteers are older, with older bodies, we often have need for help that takes a long time to arrange because most of our supporters are also older," Executive Director Donna Zellner Neal said. "We have three floors in our building and we are, as a new and developing museum, constantly rearranging things. Our freight elevator is in need of repair, which makes hauling things between floors more difficult than it would be if the elevator worked."

The seven, able-bodied Ingram-Micro employees who came out to help this past Friday were Kelly Sander, Paul Kanick, Pete Houseman, Sean McManus, Nick Moses, Chis Kacala, and Jeff Wiza.

The Museum, established in 2004, contains an extraordinarily comprehensive collection of exhibits, artifacts, rare pictures, memorabilia and nuggets of historical information meticulously researched concerning the City of North Tonawanda, once known as the “Lumber Capital of the World” for its role as a shipping and manufacturing center on the historic Erie Canal and the Niagara River in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

A model of volunteerism and enterprise, everything within the museum was either donated or purchased with funds donated by the community. The museum was built without government subsidies. Admission is $5.

If you, like the good folks at Micro Ingram, want to help out some of the “old bodies” and learn a little about what it takes to operate an extraordinary museum and/or enter an open doorway to the history of North Tonawanda, call 716-213-0554.