Southeast Museum

The Southeast Museum was established in 1963 and moved into the vacated upper-level theater space of Brewster's Old Southeast Town Hall on July 6 of that year; it occupies the building to this day, now on the middle level that originally held the dancing room, jury room, and clerk's room. Its home is itself an artifact of the railroad age: Brewster and the surrounding Town of Southeast grew substantially after the Civil War thanks to the New York and Harlem Railroad, built in 1848 and acquired by the New York Central in 1864. The site's first town hall, an 1869 Second Empire building, burned when fire swept the south side of Main Street in 1880, and its 1882 replacement met the same fate in 1893 — so the present 1896 building was designed by the New York City firm of Child & DeGoll to be as fireproof as possible, built of iron and brick. In 1977 the village and the museum jointly sponsored extensive renovations that returned the building to its original appearance, with supervising architect Richard Bergmann working from the original drawings, and in 1979 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places for its early yet mature Colonial Revival architecture.