For 25 years, Elsie Robnett Brown has volunteered at the East Linn Museum.
First, every Sunday with her husband Buss and later every Friday on her own.
Saturday afternoon, the 97-year old was honored with a volunteer retirement part by other museum volunteers she’s served so faithfully.
“I enjoyed it so much, just meeting the people and showing them what we have,” Mrs. Brown said of her dedication over the years.
It was her sister-in-law, Lois Rice, who helped found the museum after collecting local historical memorabilia for years.
“Her basement just got so full she had to do something with all the stuff,” Mrs. Brown said. “People would move and ask her to take their old things.”
Born in Minnesota, Elsie Weed’s family moved to Oregon “when I was just a youngster” she said.
She attended school at Pleasant Hill and then Oregon Normal School to become a teacher.
She married Randolph “Buss” Robnett and they lived a farmer’s life, working numerous farms in the Holley and Crawfordsville areas.
Mr. Robnett died in 1983. She later married Owen Brown who also passed away.
Although they never had children of their own, Mrs. Brown said she and her husband “raised a bunch of them.”
She is especially proud of their involvement with the 4-H program.
“Our first big farm was near Crawfordsville,” she said. “We had the Calapooia 4-H club for years. It was one of the first 4-H clubs in East Linn County.”
She and her husband would invite the best livestock judges in the county to the ranch to work with the 4-H kids, she said.
Mrs. Brown recalled working the fields and raising Angus cross livestock.
“We built the new house in the 1940s,” she said. “It’s a very good house.”
Although she helped with the tractor work, Mrs. Brown says she especially enjoyed running the family’s Caterpillar bull dozer.
She taught primarily in the Crawfordsville area and substitute taught in other outlying grade schools.
“I always taught the grade school children, I never wanted to teach high school,” she said.
The East Linn Museum is a repository for “people’s precious articles,” she said.
“They leave them with us and we try to take care of them the best we can and show them to others,” she said.
An especially previous item for her is the civil war flag sew from old petticoats by her husbands great grandmother during the Civil War.
“It has to be at least 140 years old,” Mrs. Brown said, pointing to the flag that still flies on a museum wall.
For decades Mrs. Brown and her husband attended the Holley Christian Church. Today, she lives at Wiley Creek and says she enjoys have three meals a day prepared for her after all the years she cooked for farm hands.
“She’s the best cook ever,” said former museum director Martha Steinbacher.
“All of our boys helped she and Buss on the farm and she would cook up huge meals for them,” Mrs. Steinbacher said.
She also noted that the Robnetts would attend serves at the Holley church in the morning and then volunteer at the museum every Sunday afternoon for years.
Gail Gregory called Mrs. Brown a “pillar of the museum.”
Although she won’t be greeting bus loads of youngsters at the museum on a regular basis anymore, Mrs. Brown said she plans to stay busy walking each day and “helping other people.”