When longtime owner Freda Lehrer put the George Munro House at 44 State St. on the market, she knew there was one more thing she would need to do before handing over the keys: open the safe, long dormant in the corner of a back room of the first floor. She’s unsure how long it had been since the last time it was used.

“I vaguely remembering them saying that they couldn’t open it,” she said — them being her grandfather Jacob Molasky and her uncle Harry Molasky. The family ran Molasky’s store, a successful dry goods purveyor, at that location from 1900 until Harry’s death in 1979.

On Aug. 18, she opened it. Or rather safe technician Francesco Therisod, of Castle Vault & Lock, opened it. Therisod made the news not long ago, successfully opening a century-old safe in the basement of the Oliver School. A master of his craft, Therisod credits his wife’s family (she’s descended from Houdini’s locksmith) with helping him perfect his skills. It was an exciting day.

While there was nothing in the safe of excessive monetary value (“I won’t be paying anyone’s college tuition with this,” Freda joked) there was sentimental value galore: her grandfather’s old pocket watch, cards, programs from events celebrating family members, army files (both Freda’s father and uncle Harry served in WWII), blueprints from a 1922 addition to the property, birth certificates, and newspaper clippings of key events from 20th century American History, including the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the execution of the Rosenbergs, and the death of Stalin.

It was the clippings that gave Freda her best guess of when the safe was last opened.

“The last newspaper clipping that I saw was from 1960,” she said. “That’s when I was 10.”

Freda was fortunate to have known her grandfather well — he lived until she was 15. A Cranston resident, she has many fond memories of time spent in Bristol, especially July 4th weeks when she would come and stay on the second floor with her aunt, and sell things she had made from the front windows of the store. The safe brought back those memories, and more.

“It was a wonderful, exciting day, finding these things,” she said.

The Munro House was built in the 1840s on the site of an earlier building that was torn down. It has been mixed-use for virtually all that time, even serving as the local post office from 1845-1857. When Jacob and Fannie Molasky opened their dry goods store at that location in 1900, the family was already well-known in town. Jacob Molasky, Freda’s grandfather, was one of seven children of Louis Molasky and Anna Delerson Molasky, who came to the United States in 1890 from Kiev, Russia (now Ukraine). They settled in Bristol in 1892, when the National India Rubber Company moved from Long Island to Bristol.

They were in good company, following National India Rubber along with several other Eastern European Orthodox Jews from countries including Lithuania and Germany, as well as Russia. Together, a group of them they chartered Chevra Agudas Achim, The United Brothers synagogue on High Street. It is is the second-oldest synagogue in Rhode Island, after Newport’s Truro, chartered on June 11, 1900. Notably, though Louis Molasky was indeed a charter member, his name is not on the charter. He was not one of the founders who traveled to Providence in June of 1900 to sign the document, staying behind in Bristol to keep an eye on the building. Nonetheless he deserves recognition as a founder.

Louis was among several early members of the congregation who were prominent members of Bristol’s merchant class, including the Eisenstat family who owned a shoe store and department store at the State and Hope location currently occupied by Citizens Bank, and the Suzman family, who ran a clothing store on the West side of Hope between State and Bradford Streets.

Louis Molasky also owned a grocery store at the corner of State and Thames. When Jacob and Fannie opened Molasky’s, they moved into the second floor and raised their family there, eventually purchasing the property in 1910. In addition to son Harry who would take over the family business, their children included Adrian, Ruth (Freda’s mother), and Jessie, who taught in the Bristol school system for 43 years from 1923 to 1966, for 34 of those years serving as librarian of the Guiteras School.

When she died in 1991, Freda inherited the house, now the home of Jesse James Antiques, and with it, the long-locked safe.