Hefty grants awarded to Harmony, Zelienople museums
On Thursday the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission awarded more than $121,000 in grants to historical societies in Harmony and Zelienople. The money will come from the Keystone Historic Preservation Grant program.
“It’s vital that we remember our past, learn from it, and teach our communities about what transpired before our time,” said state Rep. Stephanie Scialabba, R-12th. “This funding will ensure that this history remains preserved.”
The Harmony Museum, on Mercer Street, received a grant of $98,799 to install 39 new, historically accurate windows intended to preserve the original look and feel of the museum building, which was constructed in 1809. The grant came not a moment too soon, according to Harmony Museum president and CEO Rodney Gasch.
“We have some (windows) that are in various deterioration, so we’ll fix these windows that are rotting and have rotting sills … that sort of thing,” Gasch said. “Plus, it’ll return the building to its original look.”
The new windows are made according to the designs used by the Harmonists, the religious sect that settled in Butler County and founded the borough of Harmony in the early 1800s. Gasch said the museum was able to commission near-replicas of the original windows due to a happy accident which took place during the remodeling of a nearby building.
“Someone was doing some remodeling on the inside and found that an original Harmonist window had been covered over in a rehab project, so it was left intact on an interior wall,” Gasch said. “So that’s how we know what the Harmonists’ windows looked like back in the first decade of the 1800s.”
The window replacement is the second phase of a wider project started in 2019 at another historic Harmony building, the Wagner Haus, just a few blocks away.
“We had some severely deteriorating windows that we replaced, and we did it with the original Harmonists’ designs,” Gasch said. “That was the first project, and that was successful. The transformation of the Wagner Haus was really dramatic, and we’re expecting something even more dramatic with the museum.”
Also, the Zelienople Historical Society received $22,500 to repair some structural support beams at Passavant House on South Main Street. The house has a collection of items related to the Passavant family, including the namesake of Zelienople, suffragette Zelie Passavant. The historical society has maintained stewardship of the house since 1975.
