Stopping time

EPHRATA — The Grant County Historical Society and Museum will open for the 2023 season May 5.

The museum’s main building is only the first stop of its extensive collection – and its collection is not just exhibits on a shelf. It’s full-fledged buildings, some of them original.

“We have 37 buildings out there,” said museum employee Patty Thornton.

Museum staff conduct tours of the buildings, since some of the displays are not under lock and key, she said. The entire tour takes about two hours, and people must be at the museum by 4 p.m. to join a tour, she said.

There’s the general store, where a clerk would’ve fetched the goods for a 1905 shopper. It was a long trip to town back in the day, even when the town was only five or six miles away, one people didn’t bother to take every day or every week. As a result the general store had – and the museum has – a range of goods.

“That’s one of the original buildings. So is the church,” Thornton said.

A saloon? The museum has got that. An apothecary – or as modern folks would call it, the drugstore? Yeah, but a 1910 drugstore (or apothecary) looked a lot different. The druggist sometimes mixed his own medicines. And the customer paid for them at that really cool cash register in the wood case.

The camera shop has cameras – that in their own way stopped time – from throughout the 20th century. Visitors can get a look at domestic life throughout the decades in multiple displays.

The blacksmith shop has equipment that dates to the 1940s. The dress shop has vintage fashions, and the newspaper office provides a glimpse into reporting and publishing the old-fashioned way. Museum visitors get a glimpse of a homesteader’s cabin and a line shack that provided temporary shelter for cowboys riding the range.

“Almost everything (in the displays) are donations from people in the area,” Thornton said.

The museum will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with days of operation to be announced.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.