Friday, November 7, 2025
Rock Hall Museum is expanding their horizons with a brand new educational center designed like an 18th century English barn.
The center can hold 75 to 100 people, features an ADA compliant bathroom, air conditioning and heat.
Located at 199 Broadway in Lawrence, Rock Hall was an 18th-century plantation that was transformed into a museum, owned and operated by the Town of Hempstead since 1953.
The barn was officially completed on Oct. 8 and will be used to host a spooky walk through at their annual country fair, this weekend. The first official event in the barn is “spooky family movie night in the ‘barn’” where “Beetlejuice” will be playing on Oct. 23.
“The premise behind the education center was to take pressure off the historic house,” said Amy Vacchio, director of Rock Hall Museum. “Right now we can accommodate 40 people to a program/lecture and we wanted to have a versatile space that was ADA compliant and climate controlled. This space could be used for programs, lectures, exhibits and everybody can attend and not worry about stairs.”
Next spring, Vacchio plans on using the space to celebrate the semiquincentennial of the United States for special lectures and events.
“One of the things that’s limited us is that we can’t put a nail into the wall, it’s a historic artifact,” Vacchio added. “The fact that we now have walls to do exhibits, it will be used for so many things that the Friends of Rock Hall can use as an extension of the museum.”
The Friends of Rock Hall, a non-profit founded in 1976 to support the museum and works to preserve the historic site and promote education programs related to it.
“It’s just like a barn and it looks like one that used to be at Rock Hall,” said Doug Sheer, president of Friends of Rock Hall. “We wanted to recreate that barn-like structure to keep with the history of Rock Hall and also allow us to have guest speakers and activities during the whole year.”
He said it was a lot of work to get this done and is “excited” to see how they can grow and host different things.
“There’s a lot of wonderful things we’re doing for the museum,” he added.
Vacchio said she has lots of ideas and is “excited for the next chapter” of this historic site.
“We started this barn exactly this time last year,” she said. “We did start to finish on this particular design in one year. It was originally the brainchild of my predecessor (Linda Barreira) in 2012 but it didn’t come to fruition.”
Students from all across Nassau County and Queen come to Rock Hall while studying colonial history to take part in special crafts such as wampum, cornhusk dolls or calligraphy with quills and ink.
“Part of the problem we had here was that we could only accommodate a group of 25 at a time,” Vacchio said. “The education center will also act as a space for some of our workshops for the children. This is going to make it so much better to accommodate school group and different organizations that visit the museum.”
