Beltrami Co. History Center Gets Volunteer Help on Artifact Storage Project

The Beltrami Historical Society in Bemidji has started a major endeavor with changes in all of their artifact storage. With over one million historical items in the museum, there are thousands of boxes between the two floors.

Thanks to a Legacy Grant from the Minnesota Historical Society, the History Center will be able to renovate their entire upstairs to help preserve the artifacts, some of them centuries old.

“We have wooden shelves up there right now, and acid from the wood leaches into the boxes and that could damage the artifacts,” explained Beltrami County Historical Society Executive Director Emily Thabes. “So we need to replace all of our boxes and our shelving, and that’s very expensive when it comes to museum-quality products. Our volunteers are putting together boxes and then they are pulling our old boxes of materials off the shelves. They are taking all those items out of boxes, unpacking them from the old tissue paper, wrapping them in new tissue paper, and putting them in new boxes and then putting them back on the shelves.”

The entire project is set to take about three months and was kick-started by the volunteers from Indivisible Bemidji. The History Center said that these projects normally only get one or two volunteers at a time, so having a group of over 30 people made a huge dent in the work.

“I think it shows that you care about the people in your community,” said Indivisible Bemidji member Mary Fairbanks. “It’s also important to take care of one another, to show that history is really important in our spaces, and that we honor those memories so that we can learn from them.”

Thabes added, “We want to make sure that these artifacts are available for our children and our children’s children and their children’s children. And the only way that that’s going to be possible is if we preserve them appropriately. And so having this help from the community to make sure that that preservation is done correctly is, it’s just critical to making sure the history is here forever.”

Although the new shelving project is underway, the History Center is still asking for volunteers to work on the rest of the artifacts. Those interested can contact the Beltrami County Historical Society through its website.