HUNTINGTON, NEW YORK.- The Heckscher Museum of Art presents “Our Town,” on view through November 9, 2003. No place has a single history. Every town offers its own stories, the shifting perspectives of succeeding generations and the diverse experiences of a single generation.  As the museum celebrates the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Town of Huntington this year, this is an attempt to pick up several of the skeins of its multiple histories in Our Town.

The exhibition, which runs at the Far South Gallery, offers historic paintings, documents, and photographs from the museum’s and area collections.  You can see Huntington in the 1870s and 1880s through the eyes of the German immigrant Edward Lange, who taught himself the craft of painting and whose fine feel for detail is appreciated today by art lovers and historians alike.

A fascinating figure, Lange (1846-1912) settled in the Commack area around 1871 and by 1878 seems to have given up farming to work full-time at making and selling his art.  He recorded through his art homes, farms, businesses, landscapes, and towns in the area, pictorially offering a wealth of information about the past.

Part of the fun of looking at Lange’s paintings is the importance he affords the minutiae of everyday life, from the pickets of a fence, to a well-tended vegetable garden, to the lively prancing and flying tail of a horse drawing a carriage.  This is especially evident in Lange’s charming Residence of W.P. Buffet, recently purchased and newly conserved by the Heckscher and set to be unveiled in this exhibition.  This very early Lange work pictures a farm located on Meadow Glen Road in Fort Salonga, between Northport and Kings Park.

Deep within the storage vaults at Huntington’s Town Hall, Archivist Antonia Mattheou and her staff have teased tantalizing details out of historic maps and documents, putting human faces on history.  Offering a ghostly presence are the signature marks of vanished Native Americans in the 1653 Indian deed that transfers Huntington to English settlers.  A "Dear John" letter and response between a Mr. Van Wycke and a woman named Mary makes a 19th century heartbreak seem very near indeed.  Manumissions of slaves - documents promising to free enslaved African Americans - offer yet another view of our past.

These and other treasures will be on view in Our Town.  The museum is especially grateful to the Office of the Town Clerk, to the Huntington Historical Society, and to the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities for lending wonderful work, and to historian Toby Kissam, who, with art historian Dean Failey, has done so much to bring Edward Lange to life.

An official component of Huntington’s 350th Anniversary Celebration whose Chief Sponsor is Astoria Federal Savings.  Major sponsors Caldwell Banker Sammis and the Long Island Newspapers have provided additional support.