On this episode of the Post Podcast, Ellis County Historical Society interim director Amanda Rupp stops by to share updates from the society.
Transcript
James Bell
The Ellis County Historical Society is tackling a new year with new leadership and a new vision. Interim Executive Director Amanda Rupp stops by to talk to us about what's going on down at the Historical Society. On this episode of the Post Podcast.
Amanda Rupp
There is a lot going on. Finally, finally, there's a lot going on. We have put in a lot of work in the past 10 months, this small staff and I took over in like March, so almost a year, but in 10 months, we have we have gotten a lot of stuff done.
James Bell
So. And you know, what I think is unfortunate right now is a lot of the work that is required, the work that needs to be done is behind the scenes.
Amanda Rupp
Right? Right. A lot of people don't, you know, the, the doors have been closed. So a lot of whispers, a lot of unknowns, but there is, you know, a lot you've been on there. There's a lot of cool things down there. And it's time to you know, after 50 years to reorganize. It had gotten a little out of hand. And then they had some some tragedy with building issues. But And recently, this last summer, we got all of the rest of the collection that we had stored off campus, back to our location, and it needs to be gone through with a fine tooth comb.
James Bell
Yeah, yeah. So would to back up a little bit to give everybody kind of just a little bit of background here. Yeah, when you guys took over? Well, specifically, there was there was water damage in one of the storage buildings, where you guys keep we're keeping the artifacts. So all of that the first goal when you guys took over was getting it all into that one building. So you could start to see what do we have?
Amanda Rupp
Yeah, you know, we got gifted the Sternberg collection, if you ever went down to the Sternberg Museum, when it was down on campus, it was down in one of the basements of the buildings down there, then they had wall to wall stuff, and everybody loves going down and visiting. And when Sternberg went out to the dome, they gifted the Ellis County Historical Society with everything that wasn't related to their mission out there, which was natural history. So we got a lot of the human artifacts, and we didn't have the place to, to display them all, and rented two units to put them, but they hadn't all been a session into our database or into our collections. So many, many artifacts have been sitting down there for years that has not that have not been a session into our collection, and they need to that needs to happen.
James Bell
Yeah, absolutely. You know, really, and I think, correct me if I'm wrong here, but there's like two missions at the Ellis County Historical Society. One is preserving our history. And the number two is displaying it right. But if you can't, if you're not doing number one, you can't do number two, right?
Amanda Rupp
And I spoke this to the board. And when we first got started is you know, everybody wants to see where we're going or what we're doing. But we need to assess, you know, most of the majority of the board is fairly new, we need to assess what we have before we can say what we can do with it. So that's, that's our goal.
James Bell
Yeah. And unfortunately, again, that's all that's all behind the scenes work. And you know, and it's not a quick and easy process. I think if I remember correctly from the board meeting, that you guys had last early last month, or early this month, whatever it was recently. That was one of the things it's it's a years long process, right to get through all this stuff, right?
Amanda Rupp
And, you know, with the the operating budget that they have, we're working with it. They fortunately got, you know, a three man crew that is working is splitting a full time job. So it's it's part time work. And, you know, I'm proud to say that, when I figured it up, it was like 2140 hour weeks that we've put in this work to get done. So it goes behind the scenes, and it gets done by our direction, and hopefully some volunteers.
James Bell
Yeah, yeah. And we're gonna talk about the need for volunteers here in a little bit. But one of the things that also come out of that meeting that kind of struck me was a lot of the collection is well, not necessarily related to Ellis County.
Amanda Rupp
Well, you know, beginning when they took that when they took objects, everything was important. And they were trying to, you know, amass a great collection, which they did. And then when we also got Starbucks collection collection, I don't know exactly what their criteria was for taking collections at the beginning in Sternberg, but it doesn't necessarily some things are not even from our county, there's a there's a buggy from Sheridan County. Gorgeous, old 1890s, buggy, little baby buggy, but things like that, that don't belong to our museum necessarily, that we need to just search through. And then we have extras of a lot of things that when we get down to it, can we take care of it properly? Can we can we display it and preserve it properly? do it justice, so we need to make some decisions there.
James Bell
Yeah, and it's not like again, this came out during that meeting. It's not like these items if it wasn't one of the examples I think and I think it was you gave it to the you have like nine pull behind or hold or walk behind.
Amanda Rupp
And those take up a lot of room. So I mean, they're great. And, you know, I'd love to have one in my yard or something, but as decoration, but we can't store nine pull behind plows, and, you know, even to display one, but there's also other museums that might not have one other county museums or other entities that that could. And that's our responsibility as the as a historical society that we have a guideline criteria that we need to follow through with how we do a session something or things like that. Yeah. And I think that's got to be reassuring to the community, right? It's not like these items, you know, if you're finding that they don't exactly fit in the in your collection, it's not like they're getting chunked or sold, right? They're going to other museums or right, I don't know, there's, there's criteria that you have to follow. I mean, everything has to go through our board and make a decision whether this fits our collections policy, and then the process starts of, you know, offering it to other other entities that might use it or a specialty museum that might find be able to collect just that, before we decided anything else with it. Now some things will be, you know, are damaged beyond our control or our you know, worth keeping. Those things ought to be assessed, as well by professionals that do that. So, yeah.
James Bell
But going through that collection, and sorting through all that stuff, even the sorting part, but then also doing that work of separating out nine or eight of the nine walk behind plows, that requires a lot of time and a lot of people, which is exactly what you're calling for. Now you need help. Right, right,
Amanda Rupp
We want the the community used to be involved in this. I mean, when they started in 1971, those first two decades, I mean, I look back at pictures and, and documents and the community was involved. And they had a passion for it. And I believe they still do. And maybe they just haven't, you know, had the opportunity or the reach out to to get those people involved. But there's a lot more people getting into the retirement age that need some activities. And this might be right up their alley. So
James Bell
Well, you you you mentioned the retirement age, I was thinking to the students, you know, yeah, what a cool way to interact with history of your high school student, or maybe maybe even afford a student that, like myself immigrated into Hayes, and you want to learn more about the history. My gosh, you can get in there and touch it.
Amanda Rupp
Right. And we did have some some high school students helped us move that large collection this summer. And yeah, you know, some of the things that they learned just by looking at it, and they didn't, you know, they didn't realize that we had an aerial camera that used to sit in that in an airplane for more to and he was just fascinated by it, you know, just just things that sparked their interest that they wouldn't have necessarily gotten to see in a textbook or anything else. But yeah, I'd love to have some high school students too, but we also have, we're working we were awarded a Dane Hinson. Scholarship or not scholarships, gives me internship through the Fort Hays, so we will be doing some interviews on campus next week for one student to help us a session and and catalog, the textiles collection that we have this summer. So we're getting some students involved.
James Bell
Yeah, that's awesome. I love to hear that natural. Yeah. The earlier this week, we had a Dane G. Hansen, intern from the Hayes chamber joining us so that was it. Yeah. Really cool program. Yeah, it is. So if someone's listening to us right now, they're thinking, oh, yeah, like, man, I've got a few hours a week that I could dedicate to preserving the history of Ellis County, what's the easiest and best way for them to do that?
Amanda Rupp
Well, you know, to email me, email me at director at ACH s hayes.org. Or you can call the office and leave a message and we'll get back to you our office hours are kind of limited at the moment. And sometimes we're down at the campus. So we're not sitting in our office, but that number is 6282624. And somebody will get back to you. And you just fill out a a volunteer application and a little bit of paperwork. Of course, we'd like you to be a member. But that's not necessarily, you know, set in stone. But surely, surely, if you love history, you want to be a member and it's affordable. But there's there's there's opportunities for people that like to hands on build stuff, you know, we've got a lot of shelves that need to be assembled or taken down, moved. There's some people that want to do some desk work. And there's plenty of office stuff that needs to be done before we get into the nitty gritty of actually cataloging these items, which hopefully is coming really soon. Yeah.
James Bell
You mentioned the membership. I do want to talk about that. Because, you know, one of the things that struck me again at this meeting was was How many members are involved. So it's kind of, to me, it seems like a little bit of a weird structure because you've got your, like, the Board of Trustees and you've got your members and then you've got you know, we get I don't know if you want to kind of quickly go through Yeah, how that all works.
Amanda Rupp
So, you know, back when we had an open museum That was that was a great idea you became a member and you got in free, you can come by and look through anything, you could use our archives and make copies at your leisure without charge. And there's, you know, different membership categories like student and family, and such. Now, you know, we're relying on memberships. Just to start off with, of course, when we open up a new museum of some sort, they will be able to still have those same benefits. But it's a spa, it's a way of supporting the historical society, we use a large portion of it for our general general operating budget. And so there's students, there's family, there's singles, seniors, and then if you feel like you are able to give a little bit more and would like to be a sponsor, we also have sponsorship levels. And, you know, I continually talk about the the early 70s 80s, when, you know, the historical study was booming, I say, they had a lot of members and a lot ours, our numbers have dwindled, but they've stayed steady for the past 10 or 15 years of the same 140 people that really want to participate and really want to support us, but I think we can do a lot more. So this year, you'll see us a lot more out doing a membership drive, getting more sponsors, getting more people involved. Very cool.
James Bell
Yeah. So I mean, that and what a great way to support the best historical society if you can't, or just really don't have the time to physically volunteer, you know, become a member throw a little money that way for sponsorship and, and the sponsorships. You know, we talked about this quite a bit here on the go morning show. Every little bit helps, you know, if you've got 10 Correct me if I'm wrong, but 10 $15 to sponsor something, that it may not feel like a whole lot, but together with the data.
Amanda Rupp
Right. It adds up, you know, if, you know, 10, seniors $10. There's, there's $100. You know, it adds up fast. And I say, our sponsorships have really dwindled over the past few years, the the ones that are giving $75 or more. But if one of my we have a 17, board member trustee, or excuse me, Board of Trustees, and if every single one of them went out and got, you know, $100 sponsorship or asked someone for $100 sponsorship, there's, you know, our electric bill for the month, it really does add up. Very cool. Now,
James Bell
You also mentioned this, and I think we should probably talk about this before we go, you've got a new office. So you've got the campus down there, where all the artifacts are being now held. But you also have an office for your business work. And that's in the eagle Plaza now. Right?
Amanda Rupp
Right, it's right over here across the street, or down the street. And that was a generous collaboration through the street Foundation, actually, we're taking over some of their old office space, temporarily, so that we could kind of have a centralized place to house in their storefront area to house our, our excuse me, our archives, and our online store for books and genealogy research material. So that's exciting. And then hopefully, we're going to get new computers and new software systems.
James Bell
You talked about that the meeting? I'm glad you brought that up. Because I was encouraged. You said, Well, really, you know, you've been on this for about a month or so. But you're well over halfway to the goal.
Amanda Rupp
Yeah. So you know, our computer systems are over, over 10 years old. There's a software program called past perfect that helps us catalog everything. So someday, you have a your great grandma donated something, and you wanted to go online and look at it, we'll have a a, obviously with the fee that you can sponsor and look at any item in our collection. It'll take a long time to put that in there. But I sent out a annual appeal at the middle of December and asked and asked our just our members, if they would if they would help us with this because it wasn't in our general operating budget to just go out and purchase these computers or purchase a a lease agreement with a company that would help us and my goal was $10,000 and today we're close to six already in less than two months. And so that's really encouraging that those that are our members that are here already are willing to put some more towards us. And hopefully the rest of the community too. Yeah, absolutely.
James Bell
And again, to me, it's encouraging that the folks are are it seems like you know, understanding that hey, maybe the museum's not open right now you can't go in and see the collection but the work is happening and they're supporting that right.
Amanda Rupp
And now it's been my goal also last year to if they can't come to us, we're going to come to them so I've been talking to a few different places around town and and they got stalled, you know, over the Christmas break and things got busy. But hopefully in the next six to eight weeks, we're going to have to have satellite exhibits around so that, you know, the County the county commissioners already told me that we can put one in the county building. Oh, so we're talking about putting a combine replica from a gentleman named Mike, Mike unrhymed that invented a noun, then I'm gonna butcher the name of whatever employment he he invented in the early 1900s. But anyway, so there'll be there'll be articles or artifacts out there in the community that you can still visit. And it's important for us to get those out there because people can't come to us and see him unless they're gonna be volunteers, and they can see him firsthand. Yeah, there you go. So
James Bell
Well, very cool. Um, well, I tell you, we've got to get over to our weather forecast. But anything else you want to hit on or talk about before we go?
Amanda Rupp
No, I'm just happy to be here. And you know, I'm happy to chat. If anybody wants to come in to our Eagle offices. You can usually catch me there. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, about 1230 to 330 for sure. And, you know, we've got Fizzers drop in and just tell me a little bit more about history, or what interests you so very cool.
James Bell
Yeah, it's a community effort, right?
Amanda Rupp
Yeah. So it's exciting.