How to Donate to Heritage Johnstown

We appreciate your interest in helping us preserve Johnstown’s history! Heritage Johnstown maintains a large object collection and archive. The object collection houses textiles, garments, 1889 Flood relics, iron and steel industrial items, and items relating to Johnstown businesses. The archive houses collections on all three major floods, early Johnstown history, and industrial photography, as well as a wide range of documentation that includes maps, directories, blueprints, business records, schematic plans and more, as well as personal written records, such as diaries and letters with historic significance. Our collections and archive are an invaluable resource to researchers and form the basis of our permanent and temporary museum exhibitions.

Donation process

Here is how we go about accepting donations of objects, photographs, documents, or other materials. We ask that you do not mail or drop off items to us without inquiring first.

1. Send us the e-mail form below with as much information as you can give about the item.
2. Heritage Johnstown will review the form and contact you. Please be ready to provide an image of the item.
3. If an item is accepted into the collection, a Deed of Gift Agreement will be issued. Donors must sign this form which transfers legal title to Heritage Johnstown. Title to all donations will be without restriction by the donor.
4. Items can then be mailed to Heritage Johnstown with the Deed of Gift Agreement (or dropped off if you live locally).

Please note that we will not purchase artifacts, and cannot guarantee that donated items will be on display. 

Items we don’t need

There are some items that do not meet our collections needs (despite being really interesting!) These include:

• 1977 flood newspapers. (We will review other newspaper donations, but have many examples from the 1977 flood).
• History of the Johnstown Flood Illustrated by Willis Fletcher Johnson (we have several pristine copies, as this book was mass-produced).
• Petition to the Blessed Virgin, framed statue shrine (we have many examples).
• Items that do not relate to the history of Johnstown (we know there are a lot of fascinating objects out there, but our storage space is limited).

Send an inquiry

Please send us an email using the form below to inquire about donating an artifact, document, photograph or other item. Include as much information as you can about the item, and we’ll get back in touch with you as soon as possible. Again, thank you for your interest in history and for thinking of us!