When you step into the modest, old (very old—built ca. 1780), two and a half-story house where the Queens Historical Society is located, you’re stepping into an amazing amount of Queens history.

The house, Kingsland Homestead, was built by Charles Doughty, the son of a Quaker who purchased the land the house was built on at its original location, about a half-a-mile east of its current site. However, the house gets its name from Charles’ son-in-law, Captain King , a British merchant captain, who bought the home in 1801. It stayed in the family until the 1930’s. One of its last inhabitants was “Aunt Mary,” a Quaker who was on the board of the Flushing Female Association, she helped found the first school for African American kids in Flushing.

Just studying someone in the King family could be really interesting: one of Mary’s three brothers ran a nursery and another died in a Confederate prison. You could also study the house: though the Society maintains only one period room, they have information on the entire building, including its architecture. It’s a “Long Island Half House”: more prosperous families would run a hallway down the center of their house and build rooms along either side. Less prosperous families, such as the Doughty-King family, could only afford to build rooms on one side of the hallway and were considered to have built half a house.

Upstairs is the society’s library, as well as the only restored room. Called the Victorian Room, its furnishings are all local period pieces or restorations of pieces that could have been found there in the (you guessed it) Victorian Era. Downstairs, in addition to the changing exhibit [http://www.queenshistoricalsociety.org/exhibitions.html], the Society is installing a permanent exhibit about the Doughty-King family and the history of the house.

But besides the house itself, the Society offers a lot of information if you’re interested in the history of Queens. Start with the library. You’ll need an appointment; call a week in advance with at least a general idea of what you’d like to get information on. The library contains vertical files with folders on every community on Queens—particularly Flushing, since the Flushing Historical Society went out of business in the 1980s and gave them much of their belongings. The fattest vertical files are of the largest and oldest communities, like Jamaica (which has a long history tied up with early city transit—a possible research topic).

But no matter which Queens neighborhood you’re researching, you’ll want to look through the Society’s maps and atlases. To help you piece together how the different neighborhoods developed, you can also use the Society’s collection of photographs. The Historical Society also has a ton of information on both the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs because Queens hosted both of them.

In addition to primary source documents, the Society has quite a collection on books about Queens. It also has books on rug making, stitching, and shipbuilding, as well as other crafts and skills that have kept Queens residents busy over the years.

The library also offers a ton of information on the Civil War, the Underground Railroad, and the antislavery movement on Long Island and even nationally. They’ve even gathered some of their information into a teaching kit that you can use. It includes a manumission paper (giving a slave his freedom), a man’s will listing his slaves, and newspaper ads for buying and selling slaves, as well as notices about runaways whose owners were seeking to recapture.

The history of slavery touches that of Kingsland Homestead: though its inhabitants quickly took to hiring servants, Doughty himself owned and later freed a slave. Later generations of the family worked in the antislavery movement. King, for example, would sometimes list aliases in his books for African American workers instead of their own names, indicating that the workers were probably escaped slaves whose true identities King helped keep secret.

If you’re stuck for a topic, ask about past exhibits. One that the Society recommends as a great topic for a paper is African American soldiers on Long Island during the Civil War. A recent exhibit featured photographs of different Queens parks and all sorts of interesting local history associated with them. The Society has a picture of the very first municipal playground built in Queens, Ashmead Park, built in 1914. Early playgrounds were first set up by social reformers like the Jamaica Women’s Club, in the hope that they would draw children out of playing in the street and improve public safety. When President Johnson declared War on Poverty in 1964 the Parks Department benefited, gaining 500 new employees, and you can see a picture of some of them clearing thicket at Cunningham Park.

And in case you have the itch to explore, some other places the Society recommends for research are: the Long Island Room of the Queensboro Central Library in Jamaica, the LaGuardia Archives at LaGuardia College, the Queens College Library, the Greater Astoria Historical Society, the Richmond Hill Historical Society, the Bayside Historical Society, and for genealogical research, the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society. If you are interested in architecture, they suggest the AIA guide, which tells you about almost any building in New York City.

The Queens Historical Society also conducts several programs and might send you out to explore some other historic Queens buildings. At the edge of the same park lies the Bowne House, whose builder, John Bowne, fought for religious freedom for Quakers in old New Amsterdam. You can also call the Society and ask about the Freedom Mile tour, which highlights such famous local establishments as Flushing Town Hall, the Friends’ Meeting House, and St. George’s Church. You should also ask about different neighborhood tours and be aware (especially if you’re interested in local architecture) that the Society awards “Queensmarks” to local historic buildings and organizes tours of the buildings and their neighborhoods. The Society also gives tours of its own Kingsland Homestead, often in conjunction with exhibits. And sometimes they send information about their holdings or exhibits offsite, such as slide shows. For their current programs and events [http://www.queenshistoricalsociety.org/programs.html], call them or look at their newsletter, which they publish four times a year.