THIS HUDSON VALLEY MUSEUM HAS SOME INDIANA JONES SHIT IN THE BASEMENT

The Indiana Jones part is in the basement.

Upstairs, Akin Free Library in Pawling still feels like the serious little athenaeum it was built to be: books, local history and the very old-fashioned idea that a small community deserves a place to learn.

Then you go downstairs.

Four basement rooms hold roughly 6,500 cataloged objects from Olive Mason Gunnison’s lifetime collection: birds, eggs, insects, minerals, fossils, shells, preserved specimens and objects gathered from human cultures around the world. Storage has not even been cataloged yet.

The easy story is: look at all this weird stuff.

The better story begins after the gasp, because every aging case, fragile label, unidentified object and patch of dust eventually becomes somebody’s responsibility.

Right now, that somebody is Terry Ariano.

Ariano has lived in the area for 38 years and visited the library and museum long before she worked there. Like many first-time visitors, she remembers “being overwhelmed at the amount of things to look at.”

These days, she notices different things: hand-carved bone tools made by Alaska Native people, fossils that have gained better identifications and all the quiet evidence of what responsible care requires.

A COLLECTION THAT RULED A LIFE

Olive Gunnison began collecting as a child. In her own recollection, quoted by Akin, she spent her earliest years putting insects, worms and even dead mice into small bottles before she began collecting with a purpose at 12.

She later studied zoology, botany, geology and meteorology. The collection kept growing anyway, through her own work, contributions from friends and objects reportedly brought home by broadcaster Lowell Thomas.

By 1938, Gunnison and her husband had built a separate structure on their Pawling farm to contain it. Schoolchildren came through. Visitors arrived. A private passion became a local museum.

Exactly when that museum became Akin’s has been repeated two different ways. The library’s collection history says Gunnison donated it in 1960. A later grant announcement says 1961.

Ariano found the useful distinction in Akin Hall Association minutes: the acquisition was discussed in 1960, then the collection likely opened at Akin in 1961 after the space was renovated.

That is less tidy than choosing one date and pretending the other never existed. It is also how local history often survives: part record, part memory and part very careful refusal to make the missing piece up.

WHAT 6,500 OBJECTS MEANS IN REAL LIFE

The number 6,500 is not a promotional estimate handed down from somewhere in the mist. Ariano established it while cataloging what is currently on view.

Storage has not yet been cataloged.

Three years ago, she began inventorying the displayed collection. Then came the work inside the cases: removing objects, cleaning them gently with proper protective equipment, relining shelves, returning Olive’s original labels when possible and recreating damaged labels in a similar format.

Broken glass was replaced. Cases were repaired. Taxidermy was carefully brushed while a filtered vacuum hose captured the material coming loose.

That work is stabilization and cleaning, not full taxidermy conservation. Ariano estimates about three-quarters of the exposed cases and objects are complete and hopes to finish the remainder during the winter closure.

One supplied before-and-after photograph shows what those verbs can hide: a bird once covered

in mold, visibly changed after cleaning.

Before cleaning

After cleaning

The work has enemies. Dust. Light. Insects. Humidity. Deteriorating cases. Limited money. The list, Ariano said, is essentially all of the above.

WONDER WITHOUT PRETENDING CERTAINTY

The museum contains a bald eagle, a roseate spoonbill, an ivory-billed woodpecker, bird eggs, fossils and an enormous range of minerals, shells and preserved biological specimens. The passenger pigeon and heath hen mentioned in the collection are represented by pictures rather than physical specimens.

Ariano is careful about what she does not know. She describes herself as a generalist and wants specialists in different fields to help identify which objects carry the greatest scientific or historical importance.

A paleontologist has already updated information about some fossils. Ariano imagines making that newer research available through QR codes near the displays.

That future-facing idea sits beside the hardest fact in the collection: “There is little or no provenance to any of the items,” Ariano wrote.

Provenance is the record of where an object came from, who made or collected it, who owned it and how it changed hands. Without it, an institution may know what an object appears to be without knowing the full story of how it arrived, what documentation once existed or what future research may still uncover.

Akin inherited a collection formed under the collecting practices of another era, along with the gaps in documentation that came with it.

ONE PERSON, THREE COLLECTIONS

The Gunnison Museum is only one-third of what the building holds. There is also the library and an archive and local-history collection.

Ariano is the only on-site employee, and she works part time.

Full-time staffing for each area, she said, could mean better management, more research, more publicity and more visitors. It could also allow the museum to resume some of the school engagement that faded after the pandemic. Classes that contact Ariano still visit, often with a specific interest such as minerals, but the regular program has not fully returned.

For now, preservation comes first.

“I see my skills in preserving and cataloguing what’s here to be the most important priority right now,” Ariano wrote.

That line changes the way the whole museum looks. The cases are not simply displays. They are a queue of responsibilities.

WHAT SHOULD REMAIN

Ariano does not want modernization to erase the historical presentation. She hopes future environmental controls, research and professional care can protect the museum while allowing visitors to see a 19th-century collecting impulse in the form it eventually took.

In 50 years, she wants the collection to remain available, not frozen in neglect but preserved as evidence of a period when the desire to gather and classify the natural world could rule an entire life.

The generosity of a small institution is that it keeps holding what the rest of us assume will simply continue to exist.

The burden is that nothing simply continues to exist.

Photographs by Terry Ariano.