Historical Association of Lewiston volunteer Vice President Lee Simonson has been awarded the Western New York Association of Historical Agencies Individual Achievement Award. This award is presented to an individual in Western New York whose participation and leadership have contributed significantly to the preservation and documentation of local history.

Three years ago, Simonson came up with the idea to erect a bronze monument to memorialize the bravery of the freedom-seekers escaping slavery and the courage of the people who broke the law to help them on their journey. This idea became Lewiston’s Freedom Crossing Monument, a larger-than-life bronze sculpture on the banks of the Niagara River at Lewiston Landing.

Josiah Tryon, Lewiston’s conductor on the Underground Railroad, is depicted in the monument, along with Laura Eastman, a Individual

character in Margaret Goff Clark’s book “Freedom Crossing,” and an escaping slave family. Simonson helped secure the $230,000 necessary for the project through the Niagara River Greenway Commission, the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation and the KeyBank Foundation. The Town and Village of Lewiston were major supporters of this project, agreeing to devote some of their Greenway funding to it. The monument, created by local artist Susan Geissler, was unveiled last month in dramatic fashion, with a play that ended with re-enactors re-creating the pose of the bronze sculpture.

Ryan Bradley, a fourth-grader at Thomas Marks Elementary Shool in Wilson, during halftime of the Bills-Texans football game at Ralph Wilson Stadium earlier this month, earned the chance to compete in the regional level of the Punt, Pass and Kick program by winning his age group at the sectional competition, which was held at the Buffalo Bills Fieldhouse the previous month.

Ryan won the local PPK program that teacher William Atlas held this year. Atlas has organized a competition at Thomas Marks for three preceding years. As part of the program, sponsored at the national level by the NFL and YMCA, each participant gets one chance to have one pass for distance, one kick for distance and one punt for distance. Ryan competed in the “Buffalo Bills region,” consisting of youngsters from upstate New York, as well as central and western Pennsylvania.

At the recent annual meeting and conference of the Western New York Association of Historical Agencies, Ann Marie Linnaberry, assistant director and education coordinator of the Niagara County Historical Society in the City of Lockport, and Elaine Timm, treasurer of the Historical Society of North German Settlements in Western New York in the Town of Lockport, accepted an award presented to the “Town Historians and Historical Societies of Niagara County, in particular the North Tonawanda History Museum.” The award was bestowed at the Buffalo&Erie County Historical Society and was given for the collaborative work on the “Niagara Historic Trail,” a book published in January.

Linnaberry and Timm accepted the award for North Tonawanda History Museum Executive Director Donna Zellner Neal, who conceived the project, coordinated and edited the book and laid out a strategy to fund the sale of future printings.

Funds for initial printing were provided by Niagara County and the New York Council for the Humanities. Printing was by Pioneer Printers, of North Tonawanda; Beverly DiPalma, of Quinlan& Co., produced the cover design.