Pioneer Day coming Saturday to Grant County Museum
File photos Left: A simulated gunfight, a real blacksmith at work and stick horse races will be among the activities at the annual Pioneer Day at the Grant County Museum Saturday. Above: Adam Roduner leans on the door to the old jail at the Grant County Museum at last year’s Pioneer Day.
File photo A simulated gunfight, a real blacksmith at work and stick horse races will be among the activities at the annual Pioneer Day at the Grant County Museum Saturday.
EPHRATA — The Grant County Museum’s summer finale is scheduled –
Hey, wait. Is that a gunfight?
Why, yes it is. The bad guys are trying to rob the bank and the sheriff will come to the rescue. (Spoiler alert: It ends badly for the bad guys.) The attempted bank robbery is one of the highlights of the annual Pioneer Day Saturday.
Pioneer Day will be 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the museum, 742 Northwest Basin St. in Ephrata. Admission is $3.50 per person for adults, $2.50 per person for children ages 6-15, and children age 5 and younger are admitted free.
The museum is remains open until Sept. 30, when it closes for the season.
The bank robbery and gunfight are courtesy of the Grant County Sheriff’s Posse, and it’s so much fun it’s repeated throughout the day. Many of the actors have been playing their parts for decades.
The blacksmith shop will be open, with a real blacksmith, using equipment that dates to the mid-1940s and the blacksmith that worked on the Manhattan Project. (For those whose knowledge of mid-20th Century history is a little hazy, that was the name given to the project to develop the atomic bomb.) Customers at the blacksmith shop will have the chance to try some woodburning with branding irons heated at the forge.
Stick horse races will be offered for the kids throughout the day, with the winners receiving trophies. The saloon will let kids get water the really old-fashioned way – with a hand pump. And kids can also wash clothes the old-fashioned way, on a washboard, run them through an old-school wringer, and hang them on the clothesline.
American Legion Post No. 28, Ephrata, will be selling hamburgers, cheeseburgers and hot dogs during the day. Hamburgers and cheeseburgers with coleslaw and chips are $6 each, hot dogs are $2 each.
The museum “depicts the history of Grant County,” said museum director Pat Witham. In addition to the bank, the saloon and blacksmith shop, the museum includes displays of homes and schools in early Grant County, a doctor’s office and a general store of the early to mid-20th Century, among others.