Quarterly report

Quarterly report for the Heritage Museum Society

On May27, 2011, Jeff Foster brought his class up from Coquille for their annual museum tour. The kids love it and get the grand tour that includes going through the basement. Other groups that visited in June include a group from the Salem Presbyterian Church; and Geo-Cacher’s from Salem and Bend. Peggy continued to work on the newsletter during the transition of merging the museum and Library into the Community Services Department. Robin Puccetti is the Supervisor of the department.

In June an Intern from Western began working at the museum for her Political Science class. She completed 90 hours by the end of July and tackled a great variety of tasks that were being neglected.
The museum signed up for the StEPS program through the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) . There are no deadlines for completion and a nominal one-time fee for materials. This program gives minimum and maximum guidelines to achieve benchmarks to improve all aspects of museum operations. Also in June we had Geo-Cacher’s from Albany and Lebanon, Henry Hill School brought 26 students and parents and then we had a new one…Talmadge Middle School had a scavenger hunt that involved finding things around and about our local community and 5 teens came in looking for some local history to add to their list of finds.

July brought a class of 20 seniors from Chemeketa; they all seemed to enjoy the tour and thoroughly enjoyed the presentation given by Scott McArthur. Thank you Scott! Peggy was able to attend a meeting of members of the NW Archivists at Willamette University. Peggy said, “I always get a lot of useful information when discussing the procedures and shortcuts we all rely on, especially now. Plus it amazes me the types of archives that are held by unexpected corporations.”

In August we had three different groups of Geocachers from Albany, Salem and Suver. One person from Suver signed us up on another gps activity that is called Wayside’s. Which includes historic and usually hard to find structures; for instance he has made it a goal to find all of the chapels that stood at Camp Adair. Some are demolished, but he finds the ruins, some have been completely removed from the Adair site and some are buried so completely in brush that he’s turned to Google Earth to find the building that he ultimately needed to machete his way into. We held out annual membership picnic and we had a great time. It’s nice to visit without an agenda or a project and the food is fabulous!!  The best part of the summer…the museum has a full board for the first time in a very long time. Thank you all who have committed to serving the museum and the community!

September seemed quiet with the beginning of the school year and the sudden rush of winter upon us. Peggy attended a meeting with Rogue Hop Farm to brainstorm exhibit ideas and possible grant funding to make them happen. She gave presentations to the senior seminar classes at Central High School and have three prospective students that would like to do projects. Two of them may be incorporated into the Oregon Museum grant that we’ve applied for through the Oregon Heritage Commission. She also, gave a tour to a Cub Scout den from Dallas, the topic was collaboration and how people and communities work together to make life better. We were again a host site for the ghost walk; we had roughly 300 people come through, and Peggy presented stories to about 9 groups.  Thank you to Donna Muncrief who was our star door slammer (she surprised even me after she called to bow out due to illness and I was caught unawares during the first story when she sneaked in when she felt well enough to help out.) During the Hop & Heritage Festival Peggy carried the other “museum open” sign down to the corner on Main Street and about half of our visitors that day had walked down because they’d seen the sign on the corner. Neat! Thanks to Mr. Eb for making it for us.