Notes |
- https://historicvalentownmuseum.org/page.php?page=jsheldonfisher
- Sheldon, as he was known, was born in 1907 at the 1811 Fisher homestead in Fishers, the town named for the pioneer family.
In 1939 he met and married Lillian Lewis who was from a Virginia family transplanted to Missouri.
Like Sheldon, she was a history buff, enough so that they spent their 1939 honeymoon poking around New England graveyards and searching out family records.
In 1940 they purchased Valentown Hall at Victor, NY, which had been envisioned decades before as a major commercial complex of shops when a projected railroad was to bring the world to its porches. When the railroad project stalled, the building accommodated more localized uses, then went into decline. Now the young couple made it the center of their professional and family lives.
In 1944 the Fishers Family Collection was tranferred to Valentown and two years later the rudiments of the Valentown Museum were established, beginning to make room for the historical collection that was the fruit of the family's constant alertness to artifacts and documents that were often in peril. School children and others began to visit on guided tours and the Valentown historical mission became known more widely, gradually leading to important historical items being brought to their attention.
Along the way they were instrumental in founding the Victor Historical Society and the Perinton Historical Society, as well as several others in the area. Sheldon was active in Victor town affairs during the 1960s and was the first Ontario County Historian, 1960 - 66. In 1964 the important Seneca village site on Boughton Hill in Victor was designated as a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of Interior, the first fruit of a campaign for its preservation and development begun by the Fishers in 1946.
The grateful Seneca Nation adopted Sheldon into the Heron Clan in August 1964, and the State of New York began purchases that led to the important historical site now at Ganondagan. Its public opening took place three centuries after the original site's destruction by the Marquis de Denonville.
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