The L. Caroline Underwood Museum
A Penn Yan schoolteacher collected 3,000 objects over a lifetime and left instructions for exactly what to do with them.
L. Caroline Underwood taught fifth and sixth grade in Penn Yan for 47 years, retiring only when the law required it at age 70. She traveled to Europe on the Queen Elizabeth, kept a cottage on Keuka Lake, grew hybrid lilies and irises in her garden on Liberty Street, and spent decades filling her Potter farmhouse with antiques. By the time she died in 1998 at 95, she had accumulated over 3,000 objects and a clear plan for what should happen to them.
The L. Caroline Underwood Museum at 107 Chapel Street holds her permanent collection alongside the Spencer Research Center, the Bullock Imaging Center, and rotating local history exhibits. The second floor interprets Caroline's life directly: 44 objects she specifically chose for public display, surrounded by the rest of what she gathered. Ceramic pigs, travel souvenirs, hand-sewn quilts, antique toys, fine jewelry, and the tokens her students gave her over five decades.
Don't miss: The Scherer Carriage House, behind the L. Caroline Underwood Museum on Chapel Street, holds a permanent exhibit on the Public Universal Friend's life and legacy: a portrait, bible, hat, saddle, and coachee, gathered in the building that was renovated specifically to house them. Born Jemima Wilkinson, the Friend rejected that name after a near-death illness in 1776, adopting a genderless identity as a vessel of God and preaching to growing congregations across the Northeast. The Society of Universal Friends they founded here became the first non-native settlement in what is now Yates County, built the first mills in the region, and by 1790 was the largest community of its kind this far west in New York State. The collection was made possible by Doris Coates Scherer, a benefactor of the Yates County History Center, whose name the building carries.
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