As I walk into the Porter County Museum of History in Valparaiso, Ind., my breath is taken away by how frigid it is inside. Almost as much as outside, which is a particularly blistering, snowy day. But I’m prepared.
Kevin Pazour, 27, executive director of the museum kindly called me a few days earlier to apologize and explain that the museum’s boiler had broke down.
What takes my breath away even more is the array of artifacts and oddities the building contains, and I’m just in the foyer.
To my left is a plum colored room, a red velvet chair sits in the corner adorned with real cattle horns. “Everyone calls that the devil’s chair,” Pazour joked. A taxidermy dog named Daisy hides under an antique mahogany table and for a second I could swear she blinked. There’s a mannequin dressed in civil war garb at the top of the stairs, creepily starring out through empty eyes. On the wall next to the staircase hang three gigantic tribal masks made of woods and grasses from New Guinea.
The museum, which is located in Valparaiso’s old jail and sheriff’s residence, is not only a place for the past of Porter County, Ind., but for history from all over the world.
Since 1916 the Porter County Historical Society has been receiving donations and collecting artifacts to put on display. Unfortunately, due to space constraints many are kept in an overcrowded basement for storage. But now, the pieces are getting a new museum to call home that will carry on their legacies.
“We have a collection of objects, and there’s nothing terrific about objects,” Pazour said, “unless you can put into someone’s mind that these were something important in people’s lives. That’s the goal with the new museum.”
“History is the story of people. We hope that when we put these new displays together people will see that,” said Paul Bartholomew, 79, chairman of the board of trustees for the museum and one of the primary donators of artifacts.
I can already see that as I’m guided through narrow hallways filled with archaic dolls and photographs into the freezing basement where unused pieces are kept.
Statues of ancient gods, a seven-foot Mastodon tusk and an odd skeleton of a being that sits eerily hunched over in its faux rock cage greet me in the cellar. “We don’t know what that thing is yet,” Pazour mischievously said, leaving me wondering whether he’s joking or if I am in fact in the presence of some sort of unknown creature.
The idea to move the museum to the old police station, which is significantly larger, came about in 2010 and has had its hiccups.
“When we first made plans to move forward the county said absolutely not you don’t have the authority. And we said, well, we do— we own the contents,” Pazour said. “But it’s cleared and we’re moving forward.”
The new museum will hopefully be completed by the fall of 2014 and include new additions. “We also want art and sciences to be part of the museum,” Bartholomew said.
With so much to move and an old police station to remodel Pazour, Bartholomew and their teams will be incredibly busy for the next couple years. But they are happy to do it for the sake of preserving history. “There are so many incredible discoveries from this area [Porter County] and I think that any time you can illustrate the bigger picture that’s important,” Pazour said, looking to Bartholomew, the veteran history buff, for a retort. “History is the bigger picture,” Bartholomew said with a coy smile.
I walk out of the museum, passing Daisy, who I could swear moved from when I first arrived, take a last look at the ghostly masks and pull the ancient steel door closed behind me.
The hometown and historical pride from Pazour and Bartholomew is contagious, and I walk away with my head held a little higher.
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