Museum Conservation Efforts Highlighted To Madison Officials

MADISON, NJ — Madison Borough is steeped in history and is home to the Museum of Early Trades and Crafts (METC), one of New Jersey's premier historical and cultural museums.

Deborah Farrar Starker, the executive director of METC, provided the public with an update on the ongoing projects that have been planned for Madison at a recent council meeting.

The METC is located within the James Library building, which was originally built in 1899 by philanthropist D. Willis James. The building first served as Madison’s first public library from 1900 to 1967.

"It really is a lovely magnificent building and it requires a lot of TLC, as you know. Today the James building houses the Museum of Early Trades and Crafts and our primary mission, of course, is education," Starker said.

The METC houses a large collection of tools, textiles, pottery, and archival materials that tell the stories of people who lived and worked in New Jersey decades ago.

According to Starker, the museum is currently suffering from environmental impacts to the building, which, while not new, are still affecting the building's quality. In 2012 the museum leadership commissioned a more structured preservation plan.

"What the preservation plan did was it really kind of put it into perspective. The looked at the building, they had engineers, they had architects and everyone looked at different aspects of the building to determine what needed to be done and when it needed to be done," Starker said.

Since the induction of the plan, museum officials have gone to work replacing the gutters of the original building, along with addressing various problems on the roof structure.

In 2019, the museum discovered mold in the collections room, prompting the immediate relocation of the METC's 1,500 open shelf artifacts and the relocation of the remaining 4,000 cabinet-stored artifacts to an off-site storage facility.

"Mold anywhere is a bad thing, but particularly next to a collection, it's a horrific thing," Starker said.

The National Endowment for the Humanities recently awarded the museum $348,731 for an upcoming storage project. The project includes the construction of a visible storage facility, which will allow the museum to rehouse and better preserve its existing collections while also increasing public access.

Construction on the new viewable storage facility was reportedly begun by the METC last week, with an early 2024 completion date predicted, according to Starker.The new facility will have proper environmental controls, easy access for staff, and will increase the museum's overall collection area by nearly 40 percent.

"I think if Willis James was looking down on this room right now he would be very proud of what his library, his dream has evolved into," Mayor Bob Conley said.