INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY

The Howland Stone Store was built in 1837 by Underground Railroad conductor Slocum Howland, a Quaker entrepreneur. He used his shipping connections to move Black freedom seekers to points north, though some chose to stay in Sherwood. As a documented UGRR site, the Howland Stone Store is on the National Register, and is part of the National Park Service Network to Freedom.

In the 1880s, the Howland family instituted a community Reading Room and Museum, which included a Cabinet of Curiosities gathered from Howland world travels. After Isabel Howland’s death in 1942, Alice Koon accepted the responsibility of continuing this community treasure. After Alice’s death in 1965, the building and museum were bequeathed to the Cayuga Museum in Auburn. By 1988, the Cayuga Museum realized they were unable to maintain the building or continue the mission. They offered to transfer the building and contents to a community-based 501c3 organization. A visionary community group came together, obtained non-profit status and a museum charter for the newly formed Howland Stone Store Museum. For the first time in many years, museum exhibits and regular programs were offered to the public. Behind the scenes, a treasure trove of memorabilia, abolitionist, and women’s suffrage materials was discovered and inventoried, with the most important items professionally restored. In 2008, the Sherwood Equal Rights Historic District was added to the National Register, as documented by the Museum and local historian Judith Wellman. The district is composed of twenty-eight properties in the hamlet of Sherwood, most of which have connections with Quakerism, women’s suffrage, abolition, or freedom seekers.

Opendore, the estate of noted suffragist Isabel Howland, was designed by architect Albert Brockway, and is an anchor property within the district. It had been abandoned for decades when the Museum bought it for back taxes in 2008. With the help of professional preservationists, a plan was devised to rehabilitate the derelict house into a museum. Funding was received from individuals, private foundations, and New York State. A volunteer construction team of 41 skilled individuals donated 12,000 hours. When Opendore was dedicated in 2021, it vastly expanded capacity and provided amenities which were lacking at the Stone Store, including restrooms, archival storage, exhibit space, and meeting space.