They had to move everything — the old photographs and books, collections of dolls and games, including one celebrating the television show “Leave It to Beaver,” the furniture, and yes, even the kitchen sink.

In fact, the last time the Park Forest 1950s House Museum moved, in 2015, the entire kitchen went along.

“They let us take the kitchen because they wanted it out,” said Jane Nicoll, the museum’s director since it was established 26 years ago as part of the village’s 50th anniversary.

Situated in two of Park Forest’s signature rental townhomes just north of the old Park Forest Plaza, the property would soon change hands and the owners “didn’t want to have to get someone to grandfather us in,” Nicoll said. The kitchen, looking much the same as when the rental units were erected in the late 1940s with the exception of a ’70s-era countertop, was loaded onto a platform, affixed to a freestanding wall and delivered to an unused classroom at the former St. Mary Catholic School at the southern outskirts of the village.

Amid the move, a paint chip flaked off a door. “We have it on display in a bowl, just to show how they kept painting over,” Nicoll said. “It’s a lot of layers — mostly thick, white layers.”

Along with the museum’s five decades worth of artifacts came the Park Forest Historical Society’s archives. The trove of photographs, documents, papers and oral histories relating to the development and growth of what boosters call America’s “first fully-planned, post-World War II suburb” are housed in a separate room at St. Mary.

But that time might be coming to an end and the future of the archive, and especially the museum, is in doubt.

The Catholic Church of St. Mary was established along Monee Road as the population of Park Forest surged in the decade following its founding, even though St. Liborius Church was less than 5 miles east in Steger. Not long after it was built, St. Mary’s school expanded along a sprawling hallway. The future was bright.

In the decades that followed, the fortunes of Park Forest ebbed and flowed. The celebrated Park Forest Plaza — one of the first suburban shopping malls in America, which had siphoned commerce from former shopping meccas such as downtown Chicago Heights — was one-upped in turn by Matteson’s indoor Lincoln Mall. Stores moved away and Park Forest’s signature clock tower was demolished. Officials moved forward with a plan to redevelop the plaza into a more traditional downtown business district.

St. Mary closed its school in 2011, working instead with St. Liborius to support Mother Teresa Academy in Crete. The partnership between the two churches also includes a shared Mass schedule, among other combined services.

Not long after the school closed, the Park Forest Historical Society moved in, renting a former classroom initially for the archive, and later the 1950s Park Forest House Museum after it was booted from its townhome.

The new home was more forest than Park Forest, not far from Thorn Creek Nature Preserve and somewhat off the more well-traveled roads. But the classrooms offered room to spread out a bit, as well as an opportunity to recreate scenes not just of the village’s early living spaces, but the educational ones as well.

One of the museum’s signature displays is its annual look back at an elementary school Valentine’s Day, complete with vintage decorations and valentine cards straight from the 1950s. It’s up now through March 8 at the museum, 227 Monee Road.

“We’ve had people go through who went to Forest Boulevard School and get a tremendous kick out of it,” Nicoll said.

The kitchen, where visitors can rifle through drawers and cabinets filled with Tupperware, aluminum serving dishes and other modern doodads available to postwar home cooks, is a year-round attraction.

“People are fascinated by the kitchen,” she said. “Older women go through and say, ‘I still have that’ — they’re amazed that it would be in a museum!”

It’s not just the kitchen gadgets.

“I remember this from my mother’s house. I remember this from my grandmother’s house. That happens in every room,” Nicoll said. “It just depends on what catches people’s fancy.”

The museum dates back 26 years to the villagewide celebration of Park Forest’s 50th anniversary, but the historical society’s archive goes back even further, to some random historical papers that were at the Park Forest Public Library. Nicoll was still relatively fresh out of library school and had moved to Park Forest in the late 1970s for her first job when she and another librarian decided to organize the library’s historical collection into an accessible archive.

As time went by, space at the library began to fill up and “the archive went partly into storage,” she said. “The library got rid of things, and said ‘do you want this? Otherwise we’re throwing it out.’ ”

Most often they did want it.

Meanwhile, the aging founders and early residents of Park Forest continued to donate documents, artifacts, entire photo collections. There were boxes of VHS tapes and master reels of most of the historical society programs going back decades, and boxes of Park Forest Reporter newspapers chronicling the village’s early growth.

The collection was split between storage pods controlled by the library and the society, the museum and even Hope Lutheran Church, where Nicoll would have to “make an appointment to go to the attic to get newspaper articles people wanted.”

The space at St. Mary allowed the collection to be reconsolidated and made more available to researchers. That includes materials — oral histories and written documents — about the planned integration of Park Forest in 1959.

“The circumstances surrounding the first integration is one of the most remarkable things about Park Forest — the role that private individuals played in trying to break the color line,” Nicoll said. “That’s one of the most researched things currently. It was a remarkable story of that time, and you hear different facets of that.”

Nicoll, who has spent decades cataloging, preserving and showcasing the history of Park Forest, had a chance to gain firsthand insight into that story not too long ago through her work at the museum.

“During COVID a woman called and wanted to bring her uncle in to see the museum because he’d lived in Park Forest in the early days. He was going to be 100,” she said. “When she brought him in, he said ‘Let me tell you how we did the first integration.’ He was part of the committee, and I’d never heard his name before.”

The chair of the Park Forest Commission on Human Relations in the 1950s, H. Thurber Stowell had worked to peacefully integrate the newish village at a time when racial redlining and ugly confrontations were rampant. And when pioneering Black residents Dr. Charles Z. Wilson and his family moved in on Dec. 24, 1959, Stowell was there to greet them.

“He helped them move in, and he helped them find a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve,” Nicoll said. “I’m so glad we got to meet him and find out his story. We put him in the Hall of Fame.”

The encounter illustrates one of the elements that makes her work, mostly done on a volunteer basis, worthwhile.

“Park Forest has a very special history, and it was recent enough that you can find it. You could be the one who was documenting it,” Nicoll said. “I was working with the pioneers of the town.”

In a video message posted in December updating the Catholic Diocese of Joliet’s restructuring plan, Bishop Ron Hicks cited declining Mass attendance, smaller Sunday collections and a shortage of active parish priests in forcing tough decisions. He said the diocese plans to announce decisions in March about the future of 19 parishes in Will, DuPage and Grundy counties, St. Mary and St. Liborius among them. It’s the last phase of a wider effort that in late 2023 reduced another set of parishes in the diocese in number from 16 to seven.

Nicoll said she was hopeful at the outset of the process, because St. Mary is contained to one floor and is ADA compliant, but based on “scuttlebutt” she believes “the church is probably closing.”

If that happens, it will be time for some more tough decisions, for Nicoll and her colleagues with the Park Forest Historical Society.

“The archive is the thing we will definitely have to find a place for,” she said. “We’re not as sure we can carry on with the museum if we have to move it.”

Even before news of St. Mary’s potential closing reached her, Nicoll was having trouble keeping the museum going with dwindling help from aging volunteers and a shoestring budget.

“So what’s our future?” she said. “Do we find a place or don’t we? What are we going to do with it if we don’t?

“If we have to choose, we have to save the archive. If we can’t find a place for it, we have to find if another archive would take it, like a university, but I would rather have some more years of getting it organized before I hand it over.”

Nicoll isn’t giving up hope for a better outcome. Perhaps St. Mary won’t close. Or maybe a move could be a good thing, if they are able to secure a low-cost home in one of the empty downtown storefronts of the former Park Forest Plaza.

“We might help attract more business by being there, even if we couldn’t afford to pay the kind of rent that they have asked us in the past to pay when we did look downtown,” she said. “Something as respected as the historical society being housed in the historic village’s downtown is certainly better than an empty storefront.”

It’s important, Nicoll said, to keep Park Forest’s origin stories available to the village’s residents.

“Part of the mission is to give people pride in place, let them know how special this place is,” she said. “They don’t get to hear that enough. A lot of people have no idea how special this place is — architecturally and socially, there are books written on it.”

And on a personal level, she’s put a lot of heart and effort into the museum and archive over the last few decades.

“It breaks your heart,” Nicoll said. It’s come in over the years, and it will be hard to let go of.

“It’s been quite a journey trying to save the history of Park Forest.”

Landmarks is a column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.