Grant County museum a gold mine of history

By Tom Hintgen (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Grant County residents who haven’t set foot in their museum in quite a while — or haven’t even been there — will be pleasantly surprised by what’s included in the many exhibits and what’s available for research at the building near the county courthouse in Elbow Lake.

“We have lots of exhibits dating back to when Grant County began as an official government entity back in 1873,” director Patty Benson said. “Our exhibits actually include things from pre-historic times and into the middle of the 20th century.”

As for research, many people stop at the museum when they dig into family history.

“Genealogy is a big part of what we do,” Benson said, “and people appreciate that we can help them with census records, naturalization records, and things like Norwegian-Lutheran church records.”

Obituaries and marriages are indexed at the Grant County Historical Society. In addition to that, all of the county’s old newspapers are on file at the museum. Over the years newspapers were published in Elbow Lake, Herman, Hoffman, Ashby, Wendell and Barrett.

Hours at the museum are 10 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. The facility is also open Saturdays with those same hours between Memorial Day and Labor Day, to accommodate tourists and relatives coming home to visit family members in Grant County.

The building that houses the museum, at the intersection of Highway 79 East and main street near the courthouse on the north side of downtown, was built in 1959. Different rooms house all of the displays, including military displays from World War I and World War II, log cabins, old barbershops, model T vehicles, railroad carts and other historical items.

Director Benson, who has served in her capacity for close to 15 years, writes a weekly column for the Grant County Herald entitled “Way Back When” covering events in Grant County from 10, 25, 50 and 75 years ago.

“The Historical Society always is working to improve itself,” Benson said. “We have a good board of directors, and at our annual meeting we look at ways to do things even better.”

This year the annual meeting will be 2 p.m. Saturday, April 14, at the Elbow Lake Community Building. Benson and the board members will review the past year, discuss goals for the coming year, and provide details about strategic planning and prioritizing needs at the museum. The guest speaker will be Lorna Anderson of Perham who will talk about rosemaling (Norwegian decorative painting).

“To show our members that we don’t stand pat, we’ll also review the federal grant we received to allow for an assessment of our collections and preservation activities — from an outside conservator point of view,” Benson said. “The review should get underway in early July 2007.”