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.