STEVE SCHOLFIELD photo Edna-Mai Michelson Holland of Spring Lake, director of Estonian archives in the U.S., presents a traditional Estonian folk costume to Sheldon Wolpin, chairman of the Lakewood Heritage Commission. The costume will be displayed in the Lakewood Heritage Museum, which is run by the commission.

LAKEWOOD -- A used linen shirt, an orange wool skirt and a well-worn pair of leather shoes need some special qualities to be in a museum.

Oh, they're 216 years old? Yep, that'll do it.

And so the Lakewood Heritage Museum accepted a traditional folk costume from the Lakewood Estonian Association Thursday in the first official partnership between the two groups.

Juhan Simonson of Lakewood, a current member and former president of the Estonian American National Council, said he wanted the museum to have an Estonian presence because his community has been prevalent in the township since World War II.

Estonian refugees came to Lakewood -- via New York City -- in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Many became hard laborers, as evidenced by the Estonian Lutheran Church built on E. Seventh Street in the 1960s.

The Lakewood Estonian Association will celebrate its 60th anniversary later this year in part by donating more artifacts to the museum.

"It's wonderful, magnificent," said Sheldon Wolpin, chairman of the Lakewood Heritage Commission, which oversees the one-room museum at the Board of Education administration building on Princeton Avenue.

"The thing's what? Two hundred years old?" Wolpin added. "How many museums this size can claim to have something like this."

The costume took a circuitous route to the museum.

It was donated by Estonian Archives in U.S. Inc., a depository of Estonian-American materials. The outfit is originally from Muhu, an island in the Baltic Sea off the western coast of Estonia.

The late Alice Zimmerman, a longtime Lakewood resident, brought it with her when she immigrated to New York City in the 1930s.

"This costume, made in 1788, is an especially valuable and rare example of ethnic handwork dating from the time before any artificial dies were used and before any industrial machinery was employed in that part of Estonia," Simonson, a heritage commission member, wrote in a history of the costume.

Thursday was the unveiling of that example.

The blouse was a traditional formal shirt with hand-crafted lace and embroidery.

The orange skirt, made of fine wool, got its color from a plant root native to Muhu, said Edna-Mai Michelson-Holland of Spring Lake, director of the Estonian artifacts depository.

The vertical lines on the pleats of the skirt meant little to most observers. But to Estonians in the late 18th century, the lines -- their colors, designs and placement -- were like a local map.