HUMBOLDT – Late one afternoon 30 years ago Bob Adams checked lights and locks in his downtown variety store, looked at the black-faced clock with Ben Franklin splashed across the top in white, and walked out of the store for the last time. Retirement was his, after selling do-dads and whatchamacallits for decades.
Saturday scores of folks will meander through Humboldt Historical Society’s five-building museum complex and more than a few will recall Adams and his store when they see the old Ben Franklin clock hanging high on a wall of the Stone House.
“We’d taken the clock down, but people wanted it back up,” said Connie Cooper, president of the HHS board. Back up it went.
Attractions for visitors at annual Appreciation Day festivities will be compelling through any of many avenues. Often it will bring back memories of yesteryears.
Displays are not limited to having direct ties to Humboldt and the area. Such as a large lamp table just inside the Stone House front door. The table’s origin has been traced to the Lee family of Virginia, as in Robert E. Lee, who led Confederate forces before surrendering to Ulysses Grant 151 years ago to end the Civil War.
Somewhere also is an artifact that has ties to Grant, and so it goes with much of what is on display — including the bed on which Walter Johnson, fabulous Washington Senators pitcher, was born in 1887 about two miles north of town.
Cooper coos about how everything from tin toys to military equipment and uniforms and maybe 1,000 pairs of salt and pepper shakers are laid out for a continuing role in stories of early Humboldt and the area.
Carolyn Whitaker, another board member, had a huge hand is reconstituting what the museum buildings hold in a more organized and meaningful manner. “She worked hard for a long time,” Cooper said.
A prominent display in the Stone House — the first building when the historical society turned to museums to give olds things a fresh airing — calls attention to Monarch Cement Co., which the Wulf family, first Walter Sr. and now Walter Jr., have a made the keystone for Humboldt for more than a century. Even Walter Sr.’s desk is in the building, just he left it on his last day of work. “That’s the way he wanted it,” Cooper said, and why should she or anyone disagree.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the museum’s vast collection is that all on display came from donations, and improvements and expansions occurred with donated labor and materials, as well as revenue to handle what hands of the faithful could not.
“We don’t buy anything,” Cooper said, when it was noted that one piece displayed in the School House has been known to fetch high prices at auctions. Or sell, for that matter.
Not only do people donate to HHS’s inventory, they do so with such fervor that board members constantly are talking about ways to make more display space available. “We’d like to add on to the rear of the Stone House,” she said, pointing to where an earlier addition was made.
All is not housed in the buildings. An old Humboldt jail cell, with flat iron straps close enough together for it to hold a toddler much less an adult, greets visitors walking from Second Street to the School House. When its bed is folded down, there is little room for an occupant. Jails in the early 20th century weren’t meant to be comfortable — they obviously weren’t.
Enough farm equipment, rusty but entertainingly situated, under roof near the jail is sure to start a lengthy conversation if two with farm backgrounds happen by.
A multitude of other attractions will give those who stop by Saturday — from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and with a free lunch outdoors of hot-dogs, of course — good reason to stay an hour or two.
Several people will have displays on outdoor tables, including relics retrieved with metal detectors and observant eyes.
