Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum

1 The Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum is located on Main Street in Dresden, New York (pop. approx. 300). Here the Museum is seen walking east along Main Street in Dresden. 2 America's foremost agnostic orator was born in the upstairs bedroom, marked by the two rightmost windows on the front of the building's second floor. 3 This sign marking the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum was typical of historical markers erected by the State of New York during the early to middle twentieth century. Few examples still survive. Fewer still survive in their original locations. This sign was cleaned and painted in 2005 by Buffalo contractor Jeff Ingersoll, a relative of Robert Green Ingersoll and a benefactor of the Museum. 4 The Ingersoll House comprises three parts: the main house (beige), built on another lot in Dresden and moved to its current location; the addition (pink), built in the failed settlement of Hopeton, sledded to Dresden one winter, and attached to the main house when it was moved to its current location; and a rear addition (green), site of the current Local History room, added on site. This 1993 drawing does not show the current porches. 5 The museum's first large public room includes (left to right) HDTV orientation video; display on the Beckwith Theater, for which the Ingersoll bust was sculpted; and the 535-pound red sandstone bust of Ingersoll that (until 1968) decorated the Beckwith Theater in Dowagiac, Michigan. 6 The museum's second large public room displays a wide variety of Ingersoll artifacts and memorabilia. The display case at left features worldwide newspaper accounts of Ingersoll's death in 1899.

The Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum is located on Main Street in Dresden, New York (pop. approx. 300). Here the Museum is seen walking east along Main Street in Dresden.

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Agnostic orator Robert Green Ingersoll was born in this house on August 11, 1833. Though his family left Dresden when Robert was only four months old, this house remains the only one of Ingersoll's many residences still standing and open to the public. Exhibits include an orientation video, a rich collection of Ingersoll memorabilia and literature, a period restoration of the room in which Ingersoll was born, and a local history room. The house has been restored on three occasions. It was first restored in 1921 by a blue-ribbon committee whose members included Thomas Edison and Edgar Lee Masters. It operated as a community center until the Great Depression. It was restored in 1954 by atheist activist Joseph Lewis, and operated as a museum until the mid-1960s. It was near collapse when it was purchased in 1986 by the Council for Secular Humanism. After raising and spending more than $250,000, the Council rehabilitated the birthplace and in 1993, opened it as a museum. It is open weekends each summer and fall. For more information see www.secularhumanism.org/ingersoll . Can't make it to Dresden? For a virtual tour of the Ingersoll Museum, click here.