Collections Reorganization

From the end of January 2011  through mid-February, Museum volunteers, under the direction of then Collections Manager Heather Bouchey, helped reorganize the Museum’s artifacts.

As part of Washington County Museum efforts to continue professional museum quality preservation we have embarked upon a storage shelving upgrade. This project will replace old wooden shelving and enhance the amount of square footage available for object storage.

The Museum currently has around 900 square feet of shelving capacity. After the upgrade is complete the Museum’s shelving will have increased to 2,500 square feet, enabling the Collection Staff to properly re-house objects that were previously improperly stored.

With the help of volunteers and college students the Collections Manager was able to get the moving process off to an amazing start.

The first two days entailed everyone pitching unloading acid-free boxes from shelves and then moving the shelving into the Museum’s temporary storage space. This was no easy feat as the shelving was did not want to go back into place once moved!

As you can see from the first photograph, boxes are now placed back amongst their shelves within the temporary space.

The other set of photographs depicts the slowly emptying of old storage space and the empty unmovable shelving.

The hard work was rewarded by the excitement in discovering items that were of interest to various people. One item was a Magneto Switchboard from 1888. This telephone switchboard was used to connect Forest Grove’s first telephone calls and was built by Forest Grove resident Samuel Grant Hughes. Another object of interest was a portable table top AM/FM 1940s radio produced by Airline. This piece brought back some great memories from one of the volunteers!