Progress on the Expansion Front

I blogged a little about the progress of our new Entrance building in our Services & Facilities Enhancement Project, so thought I ought to show some of the results.

Watching an efficient construction crew at work is pretty interesting. These guys obviously have done this sort of thing before, so they move along apace, with minimal conversation or slack time.

They have a piece of equipment with independent wheels (it's orange in the pics) that the driver can turn around on a dime (and get change back, too) that lifts the heavy sections from horiozontal to vertical.

By later in the afternoon, the walls were all in place except for those they must wait on. Today, Wednesday April 29, there is a flatbed trailer loaded with pre-built trusses, so we can anticipate a roof pretty soon.

You know, this really is a community enterprise. We had financial backing of magnitude from the State Heritage Capital Campaign Fund, but after that, things were overwhelmingly local. The Sherwood Trust, a few other smaller grantors, and more than 300 individuals contributed to this 'next generation project' in the preservation of local heritage ... OUR heritage. An indication of the importance of that can be found in our daily visitor statistics. We query folks about how they happened to hear of the Museum; the lion's share of answers are variations on a theme: word of mouth. People bring thier visiting friends, relatives, and business associates to the Museum to share our collective past with them.

It's quite a story we can tell with more than 42,000 artifacts in the collection. Folks have been busy in this corner of creation for many a year and the evidence of that is all around you at Fort Walla Walla Museum.