Tarentum Book Club gives archives to Allegheny-Kiski Valley Historical Society's museum

More than a century’s worth of history has been given to the Allegheny-Kiski Valley Historical Society’s Heritage Museum in Tarentum.

The Tarentum Book Club has given four boxes to the museum containing minutes, scrapbooks and programs dating to the club’s founding in 1901.

The archives previously had been kept in basements, at a church and even in a gun safe.

“They’ve just been traveling,” said Linda Robertson, a past president of the 26-member women’s club who is set to be president again in the fall. “We needed to find a permanent home for them.”

At one time they were in Robertson’s basement.

“I said, ‘They can’t stay here; they’re going to get moldy.’ ”

The archives had been kept for a time at Central Presbyterian Church, and then in club member Barb Reuning’s basement and her husband’s gun safe.

“He wanted his gun safe back,” Robertson said.

The club’s archives will become part of the museum’s collection, Historical Society President Jim Thomas said.

“We’re going to take good care of your archives,” Thomas told club members assembled at the museum Friday, during which they heard a presentation by unofficial Tarentum historian Cindy Homburg.

Part of Homburg’s talk included the history of Hebe, the Goddess of Youth, and of whom two statues stand in Tarentum. The club helped buy the one standing at the borough’s end of the Tarentum Bridge, dedicated there in August 2014, after the original, 102-year-old statue was destroyed in a hit-and-run crash in March 2014.

The book club had put up the original Hebe statue to bring a touch of sophistication to the working-class town.

A second one bought by the borough in the 1980s stands in Riverview Memorial Park.

Thomas said the documents the club gave to the museum are “quite significant.”

“It’s 120 years of Tarentum history buried in those records,” he said.

The museum has equipment to scan them but would need someone to volunteer to do the work, Thomas said.

The museum recently obtained records covering 75 years of the New Kensington Civic Theatre. They are in the process of being scanned, Thomas said.

The museum is scheduled to reopen Saturday, June 11. A featured exhibit on Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Eddie Adams, a New Kensington native, will run through June 30.

A documentary, “An Unlikely Weapon,” will be shown beginning at 1 p.m.Saturday

Video programs of local veterans’ stories, recorded by John Bailey, will be played at 1 p.m. Thursdays beginning June 17. Sixty videos of local veterans telling their stories are available, and will be shown on Thursdays as long as there is interest.

The Heritage Museum, at 224 E. Seventh Ave., is open from noon to 3 p.m. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.