2023 Spring Newsletter

A WORD FROM THE MUSEUM PRESIDENT

Jana Harrington Barcus

The museum is in full swing with sever al events scheduled throughout the year. We are open Wednesday – Friday 10 am – 4 pm and Saturdays 10 am – 2 pm. Librarian, Leanne Shei lds and our Genealogy Society Coordinator Iris Kluber, have been super busy helping customers that are researching the history of their property, finding family members, gathering entire history

Treasurer and writer Vincent Thor pe, stays very busy doing our books and writing our weekly history ar ticles for the local newspaper, The Miami County Republic. He also keeps us in supplies needed to run the museum. We are thankful to Brian McCauley, Editor and Chief of the newspaper for giving us this opportunity. Vincent’s wife Becky

Vincent Thorpe

is a member of the Marais Des Cygnes Extension Master Gardeners and in charge of community service projects and recruiting. This year, one of their projects is building and selling beautiful planter benches to lo cal businesses. Of course we wanted one for the muse um sidewalk. Vincent and Becky were gracious to the museum and have donated a portion of a bench plant er for our visitors to enjoy. I hope all the area business embrace this project. What a beautiful and functional idea, I can’t wait to see them all over town! March brought in speaker Sara Bell on Fighting for Equality – Women’s suffrage and a traveling display we were able to have up for about a month supplied by Freedom Frontier. Sara had a great informational pre sentation and our attendees were provided drinks and snacks made by our volunteers for the event. Wes, Vincent and Leanne are doing a super job looking into and submitting requests for different grants avail able. Grants are needed to do work needed for the museum like add to our military room, adding the ele vator and other spaces we need to be able to expand and use the upstairs space. If you know of any grants that would benefit our museum, please give me a call or email us at micomuseum@gmail.com April showers brought in Marla Day and Dress for Suc cess. Our volunteers Nina, Elsie and Gordon brought up display dummies, hangers & picked out some very interesting dresses, skirts and tops to display. Marla brought a great slideshow and information on Nelly Don. You can’t mention 20th Century women’s wear without thinking of Nelly Don. They built a fashion em pire on the vision that women deserved affordable, stylish clothing regardless of means or status.

Jana

for families and more. Please use our services as they are reasonable priced and the money goes directly to the success of the museum to keep it free to visitors. Volunteer committee team Ann Benton and Gordon Geldhoff hit the floor running by scheduling monthly historical events free for everyone to attend.

These events are all scheduled on Saturdays at 1:00 so check our Facebook and website for the dates of these events. Plen ty of time to grab some lunch in town and head over to the mu seum for the event. Starting in February 2023, we hosted Phil Dixon co-founder of the Negro leagues.

Gordon Geldhoff

Phil is a great speaker and makes history fun! Phil brought us information on Kansas City Monarchs & America’s Nation al pastime. He and his lovely wife also brought several books written by Phil for sale, while Gene Morris and Ron Smith adorned our front 2 display cases and walls with their per sonal memorabilia. Jeff Hartl and Ann Davis distributed flyers all around town and we had a great turnout.

Phil Dixon

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