Deteriorating situation

The Benton County Museum is moving into the future — but the building that has housed the museum for the past 40 years might get left behind.

The Benton County Historical Society closed the museum earlier this year after an engineering report revealed that while the building is safe, it is no longer appropriate for the museum’s needs.

The building on the grounds of North Elementary School, one of the oldest buildings in the county, is still owned by the district. It once was a school building that held a lunch room, music room and wood shop.

“It’s not an unsafe building. It’s a fast-deteriorating building that’s hard to get around in,” said Historical Society President Carter Kinkead.

According to the engineering report, the building needs a new roof and walls, and supporting beams need to be fixed because of water damage.

The museum’s collection, in storage in the building, needs to be packaged and preserved while the society searches for new space. The collection contains furniture — including a pipe organ — clothing, books, items related to the Civil War and military, paintings and artwork.
“We have a vast collection of everything from the 1800s,” Kinkead said.

The board is looking to make the museum more interactive, not just exhibition space. It’s a move toward modernization.

Kinkead said the goal is to “display our history in a better environment, a place you can move around in and see everything.”

Kinkead said finding new space, moving and cataloging the collection and putting together new displays should take five years. The collection is cataloged on index cards and in ledgers.

“It’s clumsy, because of the old system. This will give us a good opportunity to computerize it as we reorganize it and repackage it for display,” he said.

The group hired an administrator in May, and will apply for grant funding for the project. They already held a banquet that drew 135 people.

“Our group is ambitious. We don’t have a great deal of money, but we have a lot of enthusiasm,” he said.

The group is soliciting ideas and suggestions from the public in a series of public forums around the county. The goal is to get the public involved in the museum’s future.

Museum Administrator Robbin Cihal’s goal is to create a fundraising plan for the group.

“We have to be able to develop a strong operating budget,” she said. “We’re going to be working on developing some good community support and hopefully these forums will be” a way to do that.

The museum’s move and update could take years.

“We need people to realize this isn’t something that will happen overnight. This is going to take a lot of planning,” she said.

The biggest challenge facing the museum, aside from finances, is cataloging the collection, Cihal said. She said to catalog and package the museum’s estimated 50,000 individual items properly, it could take years. The current building has three floors and a basement, which hold the museum’s entire collection on display.

Historical Society Board Member Karen Henson said the museum is set up in different areas, from a barbershop to a school room.
“It’s important to know where you came from and how hard people worked to get where we are today,” she said.

The community is already getting involved. Warsaw High School history teacher Matt Shoemaker held a competition in his classes to design a new museum.

Sophomore Tawny Baker, 15, was a member of the winning group. The winning design by Baker, Sarah Craft and Caitlyn Cooner is an earth-contact, green building with a rainwater collection system.

Baker, who had never been to the museum, said the goal of the project was to design a building that would be realistic and possible to build.

“I thought it was a good idea to go to the young people and see what we’d be interested in,” she said.

She said her group tried to create a green building that would have a “fun, easy atmosphere for learning, something that would interest kids.”

In the meantime, the group will offer exhibits in various locations around the county and will offer presentations on different aspects of the county’s history at its monthly meetings.

The group also plans to host forums like the one held Thursday in Warsaw so people can offer their suggestions and ideas.