The museum was in the old bank building, which is where they usually are, and the sign on the door said Tuesdays and Saturdays, one to four. I was standing there on a Wednesday at 2:15, which is a very specific kind of failure, because it means you missed by exactly one day in a place you will probably never come back to.
I put my hands on the glass and looked in. A teller cage still in place along the back wall. A wedding dress on a headless form. A card table with a jigsaw puzzle half finished on it, which told me the volunteers who staff the place spend a lot of their shift not talking to anyone.
Then I walked two blocks to the library, which was open until six, and got everything I would have gotten from the museum and more.
The museum in the old bank
Small town historical museums are almost always in a building the town could not otherwise fill. A bank, a former depot, sometimes a church, occasionally a house that a family left to the county with conditions attached.
Inside, the collection follows a pattern so consistent I could sketch it before walking in. Farm implements nobody can identify anymore. A room of military uniforms and letters, weighted heavily toward whichever war took the most local men. A cabinet of dolls. A wall of high school class photographs going back to the twenties, which is genuinely the best thing in most of these places, because you can watch a town’s population rise and fall in the size of the graduating classes. Forty faces in 1954. Nine in 2003.
And usually one strange object that has nothing to do with anything, donated by somebody’s estate, still on display out of politeness.
Hours are a suggestion, in both directions
The posted hours on a small museum are a negotiation between what the volunteers can manage and what the sign printer charged. I have arrived during posted hours to a locked door more than once. I have also knocked on a locked door outside of posted hours and had someone come around the side and let me in for an hour.
The variable is not the schedule. It is whether the person who cares about the collection happens to be in town that day. If there is a phone number on the door, and there usually is, it is somebody’s home line, and calling it is not rude. I resisted that for years because it felt like an imposition. It is not. The whole reason a person volunteers to sit in a room of dolls two afternoons a week is that they want somebody to come look.
The best museum visit I have had started with a phone number taped to a window and a woman who drove over in eleven minutes and stayed with me for two hours.
The library is the better bet
If I have one stop in a small town and I want to actually understand something, I go to the library.
It is open, first of all, which the museum frequently is not. It has a bathroom. It has air conditioning, which in August is not a small thing. Nobody asks why you are there. And a librarian in a town of two thousand knows more about that town than anyone else who will talk to a stranger for free.
I have asked a version of the same question in a lot of these buildings: what should I know about this place that I would not figure out from driving through it. The answers have been better than anything I could have found on my own. A dam project that took half a township in the fifties. A factory that closed and where everyone went. Which of the two towns fifteen miles apart is the one people are actually moving to, and why.
I have also been told, politely, that they were busy. That is fine. It is a library, not an information booth for me.
The local history shelf
Every small library has one, usually near the reference desk, often not circulating. It is where the self-published county histories live.
These books are strange and I love them. They are typically produced for an anniversary, compiled by a committee, printed in a run of five hundred, and full of things no professional publisher would allow: unlabeled photographs, chapters that are really just lists of families, arguments about which building was first that clearly had stakes for somebody. There is often a section of ads from local businesses that paid to make the printing possible, which is a snapshot of the town’s economy on the year of publication and can be compared against the street outside.
Sit with one of those for thirty minutes and you will know things about the place that nobody currently living there thinks to mention, because to them it is just the background.
What these places are really about
Here is the uncomfortable part I took a long time to see. A lot of small town museums are, functionally, about two or three families.
Whoever founded the historical society, whoever donated the building, whoever had the attic full of things worth keeping. Their letters are in the case. Their portraits are on the wall. Their version of what happened is the caption. It is nobody’s fault, it is just what happens when preservation is a volunteer activity, and the volunteers come from the households that had the leisure to volunteer.
Which means whole populations of a town can be absent from its own museum. The people who worked at the plant and rented. The migrant crews who came in seasonally for decades. Everyone who left. I have walked through collections where the entire twentieth century workforce of a place appears in exactly one photograph, uncaptioned, in the back.
I do not know what to do about that except to notice it, and to ask at the library who is not in the museum. Twice that question has gotten me a much longer conversation than I expected.
The one that actually got me
A room above a fire station, two counties from anywhere, open by appointment, which I only knew because the sign at the gas station said so.
The man who let me in was maybe eighty and had worked for the railroad. Most of the collection was ordinary. But he had built, over what he said was nine years, a scale model of the town as it stood in 1948, on two sheets of plywood, with every building he could confirm and none he could not. Where he was unsure, he had left the lot bare and put a small paper flag on it with a question mark.
Thirty or so question marks. He said he was still working on them, still asking people, and had resolved four in the last year. He was not sentimental about it at all. He talked about it the way you would talk about a fence you were building.
I have thought about those little flags more than any exhibit I have paid admission for. That is the argument for trying the door, even on a Wednesday, even when the sign says Tuesdays and Saturdays.