Shelby Mattice will explain “Tulip Mania” at the Stephentown Historical Society meeting on Sunday, February 5, at 2 pm. [private]The event is at Stephentown Heritage Center, 5 Staples Road (corner of Garfield Road), Stephentown, New York. The program is free and the building is handicapped accessible. For directions, telephone 518-733-0010.
Mattice is Curator of Bronck Museum of the Greene County Historical Society in Coxsackie, New York, the site of the oldest home in the Hudson Valley. Her talk explores the horticultural and financial history of tulips in early seventeenth century Holland. The tulip was introduced to Holland from Turkey and became wildly popular, and expensive, in just over a century. At the peak of tulip mania, in March 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than ten times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. The boom and bust of tulip sales is generally considered the first recorded economic bubble.
Mattice received a BA cum laude in Anthropology from SUNY Albany in 1970 and has been affiliated with the Bronck Museum since the summer of 1972. She completed the first comprehensive and systematic cataloging of the entire object collection of the Greene County Historical Society. She has responsibility for collections management, has designed and installed a variety of special exhibits at the Bronck Museum, and develops and participates in most of the museum’s special event programming. Shelby is an active researcher with special interest in the social history of the 17th to mid-19th centuries and has been central to the development of Bronck Museum’s outreach programs for both adult and youth audiences. [/private]