Help Fund Our Whaling & Maritime Commerce in Hudson Exhibit

We need your help to acquire documents and images for our March 6 - June 30, 2025 exhibit on Hudson's whaling history. Our city was founded by merchants and whalers from New England and we have long been proud of this heritage; in fact, our street signs sport SPOUTy the whale in homage to the city's beginnings.

The Hudson Area Library archival collection has important documents from our early history but there are many institutions such as the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Nantucket Historical Society, New York Public Library, and the Mystic Seaport that hold items valuable to this history like logbooks, letters of local whalers and seamen, and drawings and paintings of Hudson’s whaling and maritime history. We want to obtain digital versions of these for our exhibit and our permanent archival collection so that our history will be preserved locally.

This GoFundMe campaign is for the purpose of raising the funds for these digital acquisitions and their printing and framing for the exhibit. All donors to this effort will have a unique opportunity to preview this exhibition in March and learn details about our research into this important history at the special pre-opening event.

These acquisitions will be a valuable resource and a source of civic pride for our city and area. Thank you in advance for your contribution to this valuable preservation project.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pêche de la Baleine, Whale-Fishery by Frédéric Martens. The Bayou Bend Collection, museum purchase funded by the Mary Beth Baird bequest, by exchange.