GUILDERLAND — History is personal for Alice Begley; she made it accessible to Guilderland residents — through written words, plays, social events, school lessons, refurbished historical markers, and the restoration of the Schoolcraft House. After more than two decades as town historian, she is retiring at the end of the year.

When she moved into her Town Hall office, she said, there were two empty file cabinets. “I now have three file cabinets, chock full,” she said. “There isn’t room for another folder.”

Begley has written four books on local history during her tenure. She has also written two plays and a regular column, “From the historian’s desk,” for The Altamont Enterprise.

Over the years, she has inspired all sorts of people to become personally involved with history, too. During Guilderland’s bicentennial year, she organized a service at Prospect Hill Cemetery that replicated one from the century before. She helped to organize a tour to Gelderland in the Netherlands, the province for which Guilderland was named, and wrote about the trip and the visit to the town’s sister city, Nijkerk.

“We went to the mayor’s office. It was lovely. He received us with tea and cakes,” she said.

Early in her tenure as town historian, Begley documented all of the historical markers in town, publishing a series of articles on the markers in The Enterprise, and then creating a book about them, which she said would be a useful tool for teachers. She also oversaw their repair on a rotating basis.

Begley keeps a display case near her office on the second floor of the town hall. The case currently displays pieces of glass — in green, red, and black — from the glassworks that once operated along the Hungerkill. “I put little things thee so people can know about their history,” she said.

Begley was the third registered historian for New York State. She notes that lots of dedicated volunteers serve as municipal historians but the certification process requires more rigor and published writing.

“Everybody thinks my job is to find Grandma or Uncle Willie in the cemetery,” Begley said at the time she was certified. “The job of an historian is to interpret, to inform, to write public pieces, and interact with schools.”

Begley has taught schoolchildren about their history and remembers one time when she taught a class about one-room schoolhouses. The students became so enthused about what they had learned, they decided to pretend that they were in a one-room schoolhouse for a day, bringing in their lunches in sacks.

She has served under five different Guilderland supervisors — Republican Anne Tucker Rose, Democrat William Aylward, Republican Jerry Yerbury — “But just for two days,” said Begley. “He fired me and 12 other people” — Democrat Kenneth Runion, and now Democrat Peter Barber.

Her signature project has been the restoration of the Schoolcraft House. The Gothic-revival mansion on Western Avenue was built in the 1840s by John L. Schoolcraft, who later became a Congressman and one of the original presidents for the bank now known as KeyBank.

“Every town needs a few symbols to remind them of what was,” Begley said as she undertook the project.

“That house is so incredibly beautiful, and it was devastated,” she said this week. “When the town purchased it, an upstairs bedroom ceiling had collapsed to the room below. The church next door wanted to buy it to use for a parking lot.”

Her own history

Begley grew up in North Albany where, she said, “Everyone was Irish Catholic and a Democrat.”

Her mother, who was born in Scotland to an Irish family came to America on a ship, traveling with a cousin, when she was 12 years old. Her father, who drove a bakery truck and then worked for the state, had been born in Albany’s Arbor Hill.

Begley was the second of four siblings; her younger sister, her last living sibling, died this year.

“It was a great family community,” she said of North Albany in the 1920s and ’30s. “We were a typical family.”

Begley went to Public School 20 and then to high school at Cathedral Academy. She met the man who would become her husband, James Begley, at a North Albany drugstore. “He was the only fellow with a car,” she recalled. “He lived over two blocks and down one from me. When I was getting ready for a date, my mother would call out when she heard him starting up his car.”

The day after James Begley graduated from Siena College, he went to enlist for service in World War II. “They wouldn’t take Jim because he didn’t weigh enough,” Begley recalled. He consumed bananas to bulk up, returned the next day, and was enlisted.

A Navy lieutenant, James Begley served on a minesweeper in the Pacific. “They were small wooden boats that would go in first to the beaches to take out the mines so the bigger ships could come on,” she explained. “Jim’s ship was hit.”

Before he went to war, he was stationed in Alaska.

On his first five-day leave, he came home. “He said, ‘Let’s get married,’” Alice Begley recalled. “We told my parents and my mother rushed to the attic and got my sister’s wedding gown. She had been married the year before to a Navy man.”

Although there was no time to send out invitations, Sacred Heart Church was “packed full” for the wedding, Begley recalled, with all the neighborhood friends that were close as family.

After a two-day honeymoon, James Begley returned to the West Coast, soon to be joined by his new bride. “I went to Oregon where Jim’s ship was on the Columbia River,” she said. “We had three wonderful months there when they got the orders to go to war.”

She and another Navy wife drove to San Francisco where, from Telegraph Hill, they watched their husbands’ ship leave San Francisco Harbor.

Alice Begley returned to Albany by train. There, she gave birth to the first of her three children, Alice. The baby was 10 month old when Mr. Begley returned to Albany.

When Mr. Begley returned stateside near the end of the war, he was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. His wife joined him there. She remembers an August day in 1945 when he pitched for the Navy team and won a baseball game against the Marines.

That turned out to be V-J Day, the day on which Japan surrendered, effectively ending World War II.

“Thousands of young sailors were on that base, everyone was happy; it was incredible,” said Begley.

“For me being just me, I have seen a lot of really important things happen and been involved in history,” she said.

Guilderland

The Begley family grew up along with the town of Guilderland.

After the war, Begley said, “Hundreds of young men were looking for a green spot to buy a house and grow their families up. A friend told us, ‘They’re building out in Guilderland.’”

Three days after Mr. Begley came home from his service, he had

landed a job with General Electric. He worked there, as an engineer, for his entire career.

In 1953, the Begleys found a ranch house on Patricia Lane and bought it. They raised their three children there and lived together there until Mr. Begley died in 1999. The Begleys were married for 59 years.

“I could watch Jim coming home on Western Avenue,” said Begley.

She also watched the town grow. Her oldest child, Alice, went to the little red schoolhouse, since torn down, that gave Schoolhouse Road its name. Her middle child, James, started school in the basement of a Methodist church, rented by the Guilderland School district. Her youngest child, Paul, started in one of the big modern schools, Westmere Elementary, built when the district centralized.

“When we moved here, Western Avenue was two lanes — one coming and one going,” said Begley. “Now it’s seven lanes at Route 155. We hardly ever went west of 155; that was all farmland.”

Now, most of the farmland is filled with suburban housing developments and Route 20 is lined with businesses.

In 1956, Begley was one of three women to start a weekly newspaper, The Turnpike Record, to document life in the growing community. “I was walking Paul — he was just 3 or 4 — holding him by the hand when we came to a little shop on the corner run by Joan and Gordon Robinson. Joan stuck her head out and asked, ‘Would you like to help us start a newspaper?’”

They were joined by Virginia Potter. “Ginny had a baby and, when we’d put the paper together, she’d throw papers in a carton for the baby to play with,” Begley recalled.

Begley ultimately became the sole owner of The Turnpike Record, running it from 1965 to 1972 when she sold it to the printer who didn’t keep it going for long after that.

When the Begleys’ three children were grown and gone to college, Alice Begley said, “It was my turn.” She followed her daughter Alice to The College of Saint Rose and earned a degree in English and communication.

All along, she wrote articles for various publications on subjects that interested her. Begley is energetic in pursuit of her subjects. She recalled jumping on the running board of Mickey Spillane’s truck to secure an interview with the crime novelist.

It was 1989 and he had just lost 50 years of first editions and his latest, nearly finished manuscript to Hurricane Hugo.

“You get a flat tire, you fix it,” he told Begley.  “This ain’t no big thing. I can make good out of bad.”

Becoming an historian

Begley said she just “slipped into” being an historian when Kenneth Runion, then the mayor of Altamont, asked her to be the village historian after Roger Keenholts, who had filled that post, died in 1992. The Guilderland appointment followed.

She relished the role.

“When I come into Town Hall, I never know what I’m going to find on my desk,” said Begley. “Sometimes it’s a picture, or old letters, or an object of some kind like a pillow with significance. When the Guilderland Cemetery was closing, and the town took it over, someone brought in a square box with hundreds of cards, one for each of the people buried there.”

Begley carefully labels these treasures for safekeeping in the town building used for records storage, located along Western Avenue in front of Stuyvesant Plaza.

“I just finished putting Arthur Gregg’s papers from my files there,” she said. Gregg was the longtime Altamont and Guilderland historian who did much original research into local history, publishing his findings in The Enterprise, later compiled into a book, “Old Hellebergh: Scenes From Early Guilderland.”

Begley photocopied many of Gregg’s notes and records so they wouldn’t crumble with handling.  “I saved a speech he gave — handwritten, probably 20 pages; it is so beautiful to look at,” she said.

Begley has taken words of the past and brought them to life.  For example, she wrote a play based on letters Theodosia Burr Alton wrote to her beloved father, Aaron Burr. “I could hear her voice as I read those papers,” said Begley.

Her most lasting mark as town historian, though, may not be in words but in physical form — the restoration of the Schoolcraft House.

Although many were involved in securing the house, Begley noted,  “I’m the one that stuck with it.”

She secured a portrait of Schoolcraft and researched his history, visiting his grave at the Albany Rural Cemetery, and she oversaw every detail of bringing the house back to its former glory, envisioning its use as a cultural center.

“The main floor is practically done,” Begley said this week. “The handmade baseboards still need to be stained. The doors and windows are all sanded; they need to be stained, too.”

Begley is selling the house on Patricia Land where she lived for 63 years — “We’re the only ones who ever lived in it,” she said — to move to an apartment.

But she is not going to leave the Schoolcraft House. “For March, I’ve lined up a Victorian lady who will perform a drama about the Titanic at the Schoolcraft House. She brings her sea case and works with the items in it,” said Begley.

Begley says she has “some tiny regrets” about leaving her post as town historian.

“I’ve really enjoyed being the town historian,” she said. “It opened up lots of things I never knew about. But it’s time for someone else to come in. I’m 91.”

But, she concluded, returning to the Schoolcraft House, “I’m going to finish that first floor; I’m going to finish it. What they do with the top floor is up to the next person.”