Chestertown exhibit: Clarke and Barbara Dunham’s 70 ‘creative’ years

By Cathy DeDe, Chronicle Managing Editor

Clarke and Barbara Dunham may be best known for the model trains: Detailed, expansive layouts that have been displayed locally at the North Creek Depot Museum and the Dunhams’ own former Trains on Parade museum in Pottersville — and across the country, including the massive annual Christmas train layout that ran for 30 seasons at Citicorp headquarters in New York City.

Now “mostly” retired, the Duhams are celebrating their 70th wedding anniversary and the other part of their creative career with an exhibition at the Chester Town Library in Chestertown.

“Dunham: 70 Years of Creating Together” opens with a reception and celebration this Friday, Aug. 8, 3 to 5 p.m.

It features memorabilia and Broadway set models designed by Clarke plus Barbara’s woodcut prints. “It is basically a celebration of the fact that we have been creating together for 70 years,” she said.

The Dunhams have been together since high school: “He needed a date for his junior prom,” Barbara says. “His mother was my art teacher. She said, ‘I think Barbara would be a good person.’ She was a lecturer at the art museum where I had been taking courses.”

Together ever since, they married before they were out of their teens.

Before train layouts, there was theater.

“We started designing sets together when we were still in high school, in Philadelphia,” Barbara says, “and then going into college, we designed together at little theaters in the Philadelphia area.”

The business thrived. “It all comes down to some 500 shows that I’ve done,” Clarke says. Some favorites? Hoagie and Bix, a musical about the great Tin Pan Alley songwriter Hoagie Carmichael and musician Bix Beiderbecke, and the Steven Deitz romantic comedy More Fun Than Bowling.

They found the North Country while doing design work for the then-Lake George Opera Festival (now based in Saratoga). They moved their studio and home to Pottersville and split their time between there and New York City, doing train layouts and theater work around the country until retiring just a couple of years ago, they say.

The exhibit continues to August 30.

Info: 518-494-5384.

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