A new department titled “Museum of Town and District History” was established in the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum-Reserve in 2010. The building where the museum exhibition was placed was a typical dwelling house of local residents of the late 19th century. In 1901, the wooden one-storey house in Large Embankment (now at 103 Gagarin St.) belonged to the heirs of peasant Alexey Borisovich Kuznetsov. According to the old residents’ recollections, the doctor of the town hospital Joachim Yakovlevich Nodelman who served in the Kirillov district council during 35 years and died in 1919, lived in the house in the early 20th century. Later there was an office of the logging enterprise, a children’s unit of the district hospital, a kindergarten, and an elementary school (till 2009) in this building. In February 2010, upon the application of the Kirillo-Belozersky museum-reserve, the Kirillov District Administration handed over the empty house to the museum for the free use. After the renovation, the museum department that studies and presents the history of the town of Kirillov and the Kirillov district is located there.

The new museum cannot fully present the history of the Kirillov district yet, but it gives an opportunity to reflect on the past and to see how people lived in Kirillov hundred years ago, what things town dwellers were surrounded with in their everyday life, how the household furnishing changed on festive days.

The permanent exhibition of the Museum of Town and District History presents the interior of the whole dwelling house constructed in the late 19th century. Designers of the museum reconstruction didn’t set themselves aims to show really existing interiors of the rooms in this building, to reconstitute them with historical authority for this or that period. Nevertheless, they reconstructed the original lay-out of the house, restored the walls with original doorways and walled up doorways made later. The mixture of town life items of different epochs in one room reminds us of several generations of Kirillov’s inhabitants. Wallpaper, curtains, stylized chandeliers give visitors a chance to get to the atmosphere of the late 19th century when the building was constructed.