Collections/Archives

You want to donate an item (or allow us to photograph or scan it)

The best way to proceed is to leave a message on our contact us form, giving a brief description and your telephone number. Someone will call you back to discuss your offer. You might want to consult our collections policy. Click here to view. Although our focus is on items that relate to Edgewater, we also collect items that are not directly related to Edgewater but are older items that could have been used by Edgewater residents, e.g., a baby buggy. We call these items “props.” However, because we have limited space and no off-site storage, we have to be very selective on what props we accept, especially for larger items.

Please do not send us any items before first contacting us.  For items that do not fit in a mail slot, we would ask that you mail to a different address, which we would provide.

We ask each person making a donation of an item, to complete a “donation form.” Click here to view this form.

You want to know about the scope of our collections

Papers

We have sought to collect the important papers of all Edgewater organizations, papers such as board minutes, newsletters and bulletins, and flyers and posters.  For most organizations, we have only a small portion of such documents. However, we do have the archives of the North End Women’s Club, the North Lakeside Cultural Center (NLCC) and the Edgewater Community Council (ECC). These three organizations are inactive.

Edgewater Beach Hotel

We have an extensive collection of menus and other paper items from the Edgewater Beach Hotel, some business cards and matchbook covers of other Edgewater businesses, menus of Edgewater restaurants (most produced since 2000), and a number of printed postcards (most of which are of the Edgewater Beach Hotel).

High School Yearbooks (Senn and St. Gregory)

We also have over 70 Senn High School yearbooks, of which 30 were donated by the school. Click here for a list of those we have (and those we need).  We have all the yearbooks for St. Gregory the Great High School except for 2012.  A few of them are defective in one way or the other, and for certain years we’d like a better copy.  Click here for the yearbooks for which we’d like a better copy (no cut outs). We also recently were given all ten published yearbooks of the Rickover Naval Academy which was housed in the Senn High School building.

Abstracts of Title: We have several of these documents which tell us about the owners of the land before it was subdivided. (Click here for those we have.) And of course we would like abstracts that cover subdivisions we don’t have.

Photographs

As of the end of December 2022, we have approximately 5,200 photographs scanned into our collections database. Most are contemporary photos (after 1990) and, of these, many if not most relate to the activities of the Edgewater Historical Society.  However, we do have a modest collection of photo postcards depicting Edgewater scenes taken in the years 1907-1925.  We also have several high quality early photographs of Edgewater’s first grocery store and meat market operated on Bryn Mawr by Joseph McManus.

People often ask whether we have a photograph of their house – before it was modernized. The chances of our having such a photograph are very, very slim. If we might have a photo of the street on which the house is located, the chances are that the house is in the background.

Objects

As of the end of December 2022, we have accessioned 960 objects. We have a good representation of objects from the Edgewater Beach Hotel – probably the most complete collection anywhere. We also have a small collection of local campaign materials from local aldermanic campaigns and T-shirts from organizations, businesses and elected officials.

Questions

If you want to know whether we have a specific item, e.g., object or photograph, contact us using the “Contact Us” button above, and we will do a search for you. Please allow at least two weeks for a response. We are a volunteer organization.