One usually thinks of a historical museum as having only old stuff in it.
Not so.
The new Granite Falls Historical Museum building, while displaying a dress worn in the 1880s, also has technology that might be used in the 2080s.
For instance, museum visitors can punch a code into their cell phones and listen to narratives on the displays in the museum.
“They can get the tour,” on their very own phones, without having to check out headphones or other equipment, museum board member Fred Cruger said.
“There’s only about half a dozen museums in the country that have that capability right now,” according to Cruger.
Also, visitors can overlay their own property onto a digital map of the original homesteads in the area, in turn laid over an aerial photo.
The 30,000-square-foot, two-story, $300,000 building opened to crowds of more than 500 people last weekend.
Displays run the gamut from the Granite Falls homestead days, logging and farming, through the town’s boom years around 1910 to 1920, and up to present-day industry.
Other museum facts
Oldest items: American Indian artifacts including arrowheads and tools; a dress from the 1880s; a smokehouse used by the Scherrer family on their homestead in 1886.
The smokehouse “has a still in it,” Cruger said, referring to a homemade device used for making hard liquor. According members of the Scherrer family, who still maintains a home in the area, the house didn’t originally contain a still. The one on display came from Eastern Washington, Cruger said.
Heaviest items: A huge Douglas fir log — serving as a replica “spar tree,” a tree affixed with large, iron pulleys used to pull logs out of the forest — weighed an estimated 14,000 pounds when cut. After drying, “it’s probably down to eight or nine thousand,” Cruger said. The shingle-cutting equipment on display is also very heavy — “it took a forklift several trips to get that stuff in there,” he said.
Number of volunteers who worked on the displays: 20.
Number of hours they spent: Several thousand since 2005.
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