GRANITE FALLS – Once a year, the town celebrates Railroad Days, a tribute to the area’s past.
A noontime parade Saturday is scheduled, complete with logging trucks, old cars and the Seattle Seafair Pirates.
At the Granite Falls Historical Museum, where the past is always the focus, the volunteers who run the organization are celebrating a lot more than just a parade.
Two donors recently gave the museum a combined $90,000, enough for construction to begin on a new 3,000-square-foot building.
“It’s exciting, the fact that we could suddenly go from planning and planning and scrounging to executing and acting,” museum spokesman Fred Cruger said,
The museum has been recognized with statewide awards, in large part for its effort to digitize its entire photo collection and make the photos available online.
The new building will showcase the museum’s larger items and industrial exhibits, freeing up space in the museum’s cramped, century-old home.
The museum has hosted a variety of exhibits since opening in 1971 and will soon feature displays about household and daily life.
Organizers hope to finish the new $270,000 building by the spring.
The M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, whose goal is to enrich culture in the Pacific Northwest, awarded a $70,000 grant to the museum. But the award carried a stipulation, Cruger said.
Murdock placed a challenge-grant contingency on the money. To help hit the fundraising goal, the museum had to raise an additional $20,000, program director Kit Gillen said.
Museum organizers thought they’d have to gather the additional money in small donations. Instead, they got the entire $20,000 in one check from a local business.
“We just think this is an important thing for the community,” Miller Shingle co-owner Barry Miller said. “We’re proud of the heritage in the area. We feel it’s important to preserve so people can see what built this Northwest area.”
Miller Shingle donated the cash and an early century shingle-cutting machine that will be displayed in the museum.
The remaining construction money came from individual donations and a $50,000 state grant.
The museum is still trying to raise $35,000 more for the building.
With most of the money secured, the museum has been able to start construction.
The new building will feature a variety of logging, mining, railroad and other industrial exhibits.
Highlights will include a replica of a huge logging device known as a spar tree, several old storefronts, a 1904 Oldsmobile and interactive exhibits.
Designed to resemble a sawmill, the room will have mezzanines – like the catwalks in the old mills – for visitors to explore the industry’s artifacts.
Several thousand people visit the museum each year, Cruger said. Hundreds more visit the museum’s Web site, www. gfhistory.org.
“It’ll be a nice facility,” Cruger said. “It feeds on itself. The more active we get, the more people come by. The more people come by, the more active we get.”
Reporter Jackson Holtz: 425-339-3437 or jholtz@heraldnet.com.
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