A Project of the
Tompkins County Historian's Office
Remember and Learn
Tompkins County has been exciting for centuries
We live in a place that has seen a lot. Every kind of history runs through Tompkins County, whether social, military, religious, political, or even diplomatic. Tompkins County has seen slaves and slaveholders, abolitionists and copperheads, farmers and industries, and travel by roads, waters, and air.
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The Tompkins County Historical Commission works to tell and share these stories. That sharing may be online, in print, at events, or even as statues that will remind us of what has happened here.
The Tompkins County Historical Commission was created by Resolution 180-2018 of the Tompkins County Legislature on August 7, 2018, to “advise the Legislature on all historical matters relevant to Tompkins County including commemorations, events, monuments, historical publications, and grant opportunities.” The 15-member Commission, chaired by the County Historian, meets on a bi-monthly basis to advance this broad statutory mission. Its meetings are open to the public.
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The Legislature’s creation of the Commission followed two earlier special purpose County commissions focused on local history, the first in 2008 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and, in 2015, the 200th anniversary of the 1817 founding of Tompkins County. Most of the Commission’s initial members were drawn from those earlier collaborations.
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The creation of the Commission also coincided with a major financial investment by the County in the preservation and celebration of local history. In 2018, the County acquired and renovated the former headquarters of the Tompkins Trust Company on the Ithaca Commons to serve as home for the History Center in Tompkins County and other related non-profit agencies. With additional philanthropic support for interior finishes and exhibitory, a new Tompkins Center for History and Culture opened in 2019. With the History Center’s Exhibit Hall as its centerpiece, the high-profile facility has helped bring local history to a place of prominence and within easy reach of the entire community.
Tompkins County Historical Commission Members
Eve Snyder, PhD is the Historian at The History Center in Tompkins County (THC) and the Project Director for THC’s open-source community digital history project, HistoryForge. Eve earned a Ph.D. in United States History from Binghamton University and a B.A. in History and English from Rutgers University. During her graduate studies, she developed a passion for the digital humanities as a tool for increasing public engagement in history. A native of New York City, Eve inherited her love of history from her father, a historian of American Christmas traditions.
Susan Currie lives in Ithaca, and was director of the Tompkins County Public Library until her retirement in 2017. She was an academic librarian for close to 30 years at Cornell University and SUNY Binghamton Libraries. In addition to serving as a member of the Tompkins County Historical Commission, she is a member of the County Tourism Community Celebrations Grants Committee. She was a member of the Tompkins County Bicentennial Commission, the Tompkins County Commission on the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and the Tompkins County Broadband Committee.
S.K. List, the Trumansburg village historian, has been involved with Ithaca-area journalism since the 1970s, as a writer, editor, designer, and publisher, with the Ithaca Times; national art magazine Rubberstampmadness; Ithaca Child, the Paper for Parents; and the Cornell Daily Sun. Mixed in with that work, she has been a goat farmer, blacksmith, painter, publisher, and hippie-communard. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, American Demographics, Rock & Roll Confidential, and numerous alternative weeklies across the country.
Joe Mareane retired as Tompkins County Administrator in 2018 after serving in that position for nine years. Prior to coming to Tompkins, he had a long career in local government in Upstate New York, including serving as Chief Fiscal Officer for Onondaga County (Syracuse) from 1996 to 2008 and holding various department-head posts with the City of Syracuse between 1970 and 1993 including Assessment Commissioner, Director of Management and Budget, and Development Director. Between his positions with Syracuse and Onondaga County, he assisted with the development of the Palisades Center in West Nyack, NY as an executive with the Pyramid Companies and served as Vice President for Enterprise Development with the Greater Syracuse Chamber of Commerce. He holds a Masters degree in Public Administration from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne.
Carol Kammen has been Tompkins County Historian since 2000. She has organized the Municipal Historians of Tompkins County, chaired the Celebration Grants Committee, and headed the Tompkins County Historical Commission. She taught at Ithaca High School, at TC3, and for 25 years at Cornell University. She is the author of a number of books: The Doing of Local History (3 editions), Encyclopedia of Local History (2 editions), Zen and the Art of Local History, 3 histories of Cornell University, several books about Tompkins County, over a dozen dramas of local interest, and Lamentations: A Novel of Women Walking West (2021). She wrote for the Ithaca Journal for 40 years, and for 25 years wrote the editorials for History News. She was named New York Public Historian of the Year (2004), won the infrequently given Award of Distinction from the American Association for State and Local History, and the Herbert Lehman Award from the New York Academy of History (2020). She is the mother of two sons, and grandmother of three.
What with a British mother and a father in the U.S. Navy, John Wertis’ early years were spent in a diverse number of geographic locations; Puerto Rico, Washington DC, England, and Yonkers, NY. He is a member of the Cornell University Class of 1955 and never left the Finger Lakes region after graduation. He has had several careers: as Cornell’s Assistant Archivist, as a graduate student at Cornell in Science Education, as a public secondary school teacher of science and as an elementary school principle, as an Adjunct Teacher of Biology at Elmira College, and as a livestock farmer on his land not far from the Village of Trumansburg. He has retired to his current, almost full- time job, of Historian for the Town of Ulysses. He signs articles that see print as “John Wertis (The Elder)” because he has a son (not a Jr. but a John, too) who also lives in Trumansburg and does not always agree with “The Elder’s” point of view.