Two Rivers museum reopening

WASHOUGAL — While digging through storage at Two Rivers Heritage Museum, Walt Eby regularly finds new items.

Well, old items.

Exhibits all over the museum are filled with pieces Eby found in storage. When Two Rivers reopens for the season today, one of the museum’s new exhibits is titled “School Days” and is a re-creation of a classroom from the early 1900s. Along with furniture, an organ and potbellied stove, a display case features some items from various schools, including a Grass Valley School secretary’s ledger from 1867.

“History lost is history found,” said Eby, who started volunteering at the museum in 2007 and is now its facilities manager. “That was something we had here in storage in a pile of stuff.”

The rest of the display is made up of materials from Camas High School, Forest Home Elementary School, Central Elementary School, Helen Baller Elementary School, Washougal High School, Gause Elementary School, Mount Norway Elementary School and Woodburn Elementary School. The exhibit also features a chalkboard from Central, textbooks and a book strap. The museum also added an exhibit about local mining in the 1850s and a local veterans recognition display, featuring photos and items from local veterans of various wars dating to World War I.

Another exhibit new to the museum this year tells the story of the Camas paper mill and Pendleton Woolen Mills.

“Those were the beginning of all this here in east county,” said Richard Johnson, immediate past president of the museum’s board of directors.

The paper mill portion of the display contains memorabilia and parts associated with different mill departments. The Pendleton half of the exhibit features photos of the mill, fabric and a hand carder for wool. Both halves of the exhibit will feature historical information about each mill.

Museum volunteers are hoping the mill exhibit brings in a lot of visitors who can share personal experiences about each location.

“Some of our guests ask a lot of questions, and a lot of our guests tell a lot of stories,” Johnson said. “I like when guests share stories with us.”

Eby said that’s the goal of the museum.

“We’re a heritage museum, so we’re telling the stories of the community,” he said. “Our displays evoke conversation.”

But museum volunteers don’t want visitors to just share their stories while visiting the museum. They want them to leave their stories.

“We’re not just a visual museum,” said Jim Cobb, newly elected president of the museum’s board. “We’re very proud of our research department, which has business and industry records, family histories and old newspaper clippings.”

The research room also contains cemetery and funeral records and thousands of photographs. Cobb said the museum also has recorded oral histories from 200-plus residents, each talking about east county history and their respective families.

The displays aren’t the only new thing about the museum this year. Visitors might notice a large change right as they enter the museum: new floors in the entrance, which was made possible in part due to a $7,500 grant from the Beals Foundation. Since the museum took out the old carpeting, it gave volunteers a chance to rearrange the displays and move around cases to give the museum a better flow.

The board invited local residents with different areas of expertise in to help create the new displays, and rearrange the existing ones, such as the Native American artifacts and basket displays in the museum’s entrance.

As much as he enjoys hearing stories from visitors, Cobb knows it’s the volunteers who keep people coming back to the museum since it opened in 1996. At a recent training day last month, the museum had more than 25 volunteers come out to learn about the new additions to the museum so they can help out this year. The museum is also looking for a volunteer director.

“The volunteers deserve credit for everything,” he said. “They’re the heart and soul of the museum.”