News

Thanks to a generous grant from the Dickinson County Endowment Fund and other sources, our depot building will be usable year-round!  Installation of insulation and mini-splitters for heat and cooling begins soon.

Staff and volunteers have spent lots of time over the winter sorting artifacts, rearranging displays, “spiffing” exhibits, and moving duplicate items into storage. Why? To improve your experience at the museum, of course! Our displays now feature items that enable visitors to easily enter into the stories of Dickinson County. Some of our favorites? Quilts (on a new rack built by volunteer Terry Gano) that feature signatures of early residents, a gun used by Fred Gilbert – the “Wizard of Spirit Lake”- in national trapshooting contests, military uniforms – and the stories of those who wore them, and the infamous permanent wave machine used in a Milford beauty shop.

Next up? Creating meaningful labels that focus on the stories. You see, we believe that our artifacts are beyond awesome. They really are. Yet the real super power of our awesome artifacts is that they are portals into the stories of those who came before us. And those stories are worth knowing, for sure.

Thanks to two awesome Okoboji No Boundaries students, the Museum is now offering Trivia Challenges! Maggie and Jazmyn figured out a way to load scintillating questions into game software that creates a fun, fun, fun experience for everyone! The questions are all about Dickinson County history, and most include helpful photos. Teams work together to answer the questions within a time limit, and team scores are posted frequently.

To make the experience even better, our own local historian and author, Jonathan Reed, provides commentary and more information about the questions.

Be watching for our Trivia Challenges – both at the Museum and offsite! If your organization needs a fun interactive program, let us know – we’d love to share the fun with you!

The Museum is creating a new, dedicated research area, The Dickinson County Research Area, thanks to a grant from the Dickinson County Endowment Fund. Included in the grant is a computer, printer, scanner, ancestry.com software, and furniture. As part of this new area, our resource room is being named the “R. Aubrey LaFoy Resource Room” in honor of Aubrey and his long and dedicated service to the Dickinson County Museum and area history. Aubrey recently donated his extensive resource materials to the museum.

Our 140 year old depot recently received a major upgrade in the form of a new roof, thanks to a $40,000 grant from the Okoboji Foundation. It will provide decades of protection for our extensive exhibits.