Sean C. Morgan
The East Linn Museum has a completely new roof.
The project was completed just before Christmas, and the East Linn Museum Society incurred no debt, thanks to donors.
We were beginning to fear the work could not be completed until spring due to our heavy fall rains, but the final touch, the steeple, was finished before Christmas,” said Glenda Hopkins, president of ELMS.
In 2011 museum volunteers discovered a leak coming down in what they call
the “household room,” Hopkins said. East Linn Roofing repaired the leak
and checked the roof, finding cracking shingles.
ELMS held off repairing the rest of the roof until 2012 to raise funds,
Hopkins said. A number of people gave donations of $50 to $500. The
Sweet Home Community Foundation provided a $500 grant, and the Sweet
Home Genealogical Society provided $500.
GIRL SCOUT items are on exhibit at the East Linn Museum thanks to a donation by Thelma Edwards.
“I like to point out the Genealogical Society because we share personnel,” Hopkins said. “We work very well together. We share
information.”
ELMS funded about half of the $15,000 for the roofing last year. The initial repair cost about $3,000.
The people who started this, they gathered these things and said what are we going to do with them,” Hopkins said.
Let’s start a museum,” they said. “It’s the only way we’re going to preserve them.”
Those folks started the museum about 37 years ago, Hopkins said. They bought and paid off the building and then left stewardship of the artifacts, ranging from a linotype machine from The New Era and antique guns to a projector from the Sweet Home drive-in theater, clothing, furniture, roller skates and farm equipment, stored there to later generations.
The artifacts need protection, she said.
It’s the only record we have for our kids and future generations to actually see and, in some cases, handle things that were used,” Hopkins said. That’s beyond the words and images available on paper in the newspapers and other sources.
They show how times have changed and show how pioneers crossed the plains, dealing with problems as they found them, she said. They used what they had, their ingenuity.
You can learn from what they did, see where we built on top of that,” Hopkins said.
The museum had been closed throughout January and part of December. It has reopened now with its regular hours, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday.
While closed, volunteers spent a week in major cleaning in the research room and discovered a 1916 map of Sweet Home, showing parcels of land with owners’ names. Right now, volunteers are working on mounting it and finding space to hang it.
Thelma Edwards donated a collection of Girl Scout items, Hopkins said. They have been developed into a new exhibit. Among the items in the exhibit are a 1936 membership card belonging to Martha Weems Smith, a former Sweet Home teacher and wife of Casey Smith; a leader’s uniform belonging to Edwards; a 1950 Leader’s Guide to the Brownie Scout program; a 1964 Santiam Girl Scout Council leader’s notebook; and a photo album from the 1970s. A book of organizational meeting minutes date 1945 names the organizing committee as Mrs. Ashton, Mrs. Hoy, Mrs. Cardwell and Mrs. Redmond.
Also included are items from the museum’s extensive Boy Scout collection, which it received from Sam Cairnes and the Linn County Historical Museum in Brownsville.