GUILDERLAND — Guilderland has a new town historian: Mary Ellen Johnson.

Supervisor Peter Barber made the announcement at the June 7 town board meeting.

He was preempted at the start of the meeting by an enthusiastic John Haluska, who has spearheaded the task of restoring and repainting Guilderland’s historical markers as well as initiating new ones.

“Thank you for appointing Mary Ellen Johnson as historian,” said Haluska. “That’s a good move, believe me. She knows so much.”

“She accepted my offer,” said Barber.

“Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful,” said Haluska.

Mary Ellen Johnson has loved history since she was a little girl.

“It’s something I’ve always been interested in and I’ve always been a nonfiction reader … I was reading nonfiction, even as a child,” she told The Enterprise in a 2017 podcast when she first started writing her monthly column for the newspaper.

That was the year Alice Begley retired as Guilderland’s long-time historian and Ann Wemple-Person was named to replace her in the post.

Begley had written a regular column for The Enterprise and Johnson took up that role, turning out deeply researched and carefully written columns, “A glimpse of Guilderland history.”

Her columns have given residents a sense of Guilderland’s past when distinctive hamlets, long since consumed by suburban sprawl, each had their own sense of identity. She said often volunteer fire departments — like the ones in Guilderland Center or Fort Hunter — are now the only institutions that maintain the old names and provide a sense of place since other institutions like schools and post offices have been centralized.

“I wish people would develop more of an interest in Guilderland history … With suburban sprawl, it kind of gets lost,” Johnson said in 2017; we’re running that podcast conversation again this week so listeners can hear for themselves Johnson’s enthusiasm for and deep knowledge of local history.

Having grown up downstate in Rockland County, in New City, Johnson is intimately familiar with the way a place can radically change.

“At that time,” Johnson said of her girlhood in New City, “it was a very rural, unsettled area because it was on the west side of the Hudson … It was only when the Thruway opened and the Tappan Zee Bridge, plus Robert Moses built the Palisades Parkway” that “overnight development” sprung up.

“So the little place I grew up in that had about 1,200 people when I was 8 years old now has about 30,000 people just in the hamlet alone,” said Johnson, who still returns there regularly to visit family.

She came to the Albany area to get her degree at Albany State. “I’m back in the days of the teachers’ college,” said Johnson who had wanted to major in history.

“Social studies was the thing, and I majored in that, and loved it.” She had a minor in English.

Johnson was the first one in her family to get a college degree. She discovered she was really good at teaching and made a career of teaching social studies, retiring in 1994.

“If you want to be an interesting teacher,” she said, “you have to bring in more than just … ‘The Constitutional Convention was such-and-such a date,’” Johnson said, giving an example. “You try to bring in personalities … and trends.

“I’ve always been interested in social history,” said Johnson, who usually is in the midst of reading several books on history or social trends at a time, apart from her research for columns, displays, or presentations on local history.

Johnson, who lives in Guilderland Center, started volunteering with the Guilderland Historical Society after retiring from her teaching career but, in many ways, she still functions as a teacher. In addition to writing regular columns for the society’s newsletter, she put together library displays, drawing from the vast collection of historical-society photographs, which she has helped to organize.

She and Begley worked together to publish a book in the Arcadia series using those photographs, paired with descriptions to capture the town’s history. She has also organized events and speakers for the historical society and, for example, when a Guilderland High School class this past year was having its 50th reunion, Johnson volunteered to speak about town history to a standing-room-only crowd.

Her columns for The Enterprise over the last half-dozen years have often deepened understanding of current events by lending historic perspective.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, she wrote about the influenza pandemic from a century ago and how it played out locally: “Influenza came to town in 1918, closing schools and killing soldiers.”

 In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, as the nation went through a racial reckoning, Johnston wrote about how local minstrel shows flourished along with racism in the first half of the 20th Century, writing with the perspective that it’s important to examine the ugly parts as well as the heroic parts of local social history.

At the same time, she wrote a clear-eyed piece about slavery in Guilderland. “Most New Yorkers know that slavery once existed here,” her column began, “but few are aware that not only the wealthy, but a large number of ordinary New Yorkers benefited from the labor of enslaved men and women. For two centuries or longer, slaves were toiling on many of Guilderland’s farms or in local taverns, their names and labors long forgotten.”

Much of her writing is based on original sources, like memoirs, census records, and historic maps. And, Johnson spends a good deal of time perusing back issues of The Enterprise, piecing together parts of a bygone way of life.

As it looked recently like the nation might be on the brink of a recession, Johnson wrote about Guilderland in the 1930s in the midst of the Great Depression. And, although much in the news snippets were chilling — an “almost destitute” woman caring for her little nephew — Johnson pairs those accounts with stories of community members rallying to aid their town.

While an era like the 1930s may still inhabit our common memory, Johnson also digs deep, giving us pieces of history we may not otherwise have known, while still linking the local to larger history. 

She wrote, for example, about Jean de Neufville, a wealthy merchant from the Netherlands, who was sympathetic to the Patriot cause and in 1778 began shipping goods, including guns, to the United States.  De Nefville corresponded with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin regarding his loans but, at the war’s end, the lack of repayment led to the de Neufvilles’ bankruptcy in 1783.

Jean de Neufville corresponded with George Washington in 1783, bemoaning “the ruin of credit of his house.” Washington responded in January 1784, “The disaster which happened to your house with which you were connected must be affecting to every true American, especially as your great zeal in the cause of liberty & your unwearied efforts to promote the interest of the United States are well known to the Citizens of the republic.”

Johnson wrote in her typical straightforward fashion, “If de Neufville had written to Washington, hoping to get some sort of favor, he received only pleasant words.”

The de Neufville family came to the United States in 1785 in hopes of reviving their fortunes and arrived “in a virtual wilderness on the bank of the Hungerkill on the edge of the pine bush west of Albany,” Johnson writes. There, they started a glass factory, but ultimately ended in bankruptcy.

“Today, few know that the de Neufvilles played an important role in our victory over England in 1781 and seemed to be known to many of our founding fathers,” Johnson wrote. “Because of their support, the de Neufvilles lost their fortune, and in coming to America ended their lives in poverty.”

Asked how she comes up with these untold stories and makes them into compelling narratives, Johnson said, “I’m like a little beagle following a bunny … I get into something and ask, ‘Now, what could I do? Oh, I bet if I looked up such-and-such’ … and you’d be surprised how, all of a sudden, things fall into place like that.”