Planting seeds of knowledge

As a child growing up in the Hudson Valley, Melody Naccarato, now a teacher at PS 125 in West Harlem, went on memorable school trips north of the city to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s colonial revival-style home in Hyde Park and the beaux arts-style Mills Mansion at the Staatsburgh State Historic Site.

She sought something closer for her 4th-graders and decided on the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum in the Bronx’s Pelham Bay Park — New York City’s largest park. The museum sits on 220 acres of the approximately 50,000 that physician Thomas Pell purchased from the Lenape people in 1654. Publisher Robert Bartow, a Pell descendent, and his wife, Maria Lorillard, bought the property in 1836, built the Greek Revival-style mansion and lived there until 1888.

“It’s one of the last historical mansions around here, so I thought that was really cool,” said Naccarato, an ELA and…