Vernon County Museum
410 S. Center Avenue
Viroqua, Wisconsin 54665
Website: http://www.frontiernet.net/~vcmuseum/
Email: vcmuseum@frontiernet.net
(608)637-7396
Judy Mathison, Curator
The Vernon County Museum at 410 S. Center Avenue in Viroqua, Wisconsin is dedicated to the preservation of Vernon County, Wisconsin. It is operated by the Vernon County Historical Society. The large four-story brick building, formerly the Vernon County Teacher’s College, holds two floors of historical artifacts and the first floor has an extensive area for genealogy and Vernon County history research. Among these resources is a large collection of scrapbooks donated to the museum by many different donors. The scrapbooks date from 1856 to the present and hold thousands of obituaries, marriages, family histories and other area history collected from various area newspapers and magazines. One person alone donated over 50 scrapbooks to the Museum.The scrapbooks where originally wrapped in archival white paper to keep articles from falling out and to protect the books from dust and misuse. They were then tied with a soft ribbon. This preserved the books, but Museum staff and volunteers found them cumbersome to untie and hard to file on the racks without catching the neighboring books on the ribbon when removing or replacing the scrapbooks on the shelf. Many times the paper was torn in the process.
The Museum staff sought an alternative and found it in clear archival storage bags purchased from Light Impressions. The scrapbooks fit perfectly in the various size bags that were ordered in bulk. The bags were then marked in felt-tipped marker with the name or accession number that was assigned to each scrapbook. The new system makes the scrapbooks easy to open and allows them to fit neatly on the shelf and be easy to removed or replaced. Light Impressions has since discontinued selling the bags, the Museum staff hope to find another supplier. Not all scrapbooks have been re-housed in the bags. However, they are gradually being re-housed as they are being indexed.
The scrapbooks were rarely used until the Museum staff and volunteers started to index the articles in each book. The Museum did not have a computer when the project was started, so the indexing was done by writing the main person’s name in each article, the event, scrapbook name and page number on index cards. The Vernon County Museum has continued to index the scrapbooks this way as many of our volunteers and researchers do not have computer knowledge and it is something volunteers of all ages are able to do. The volunteers really enjoy reading the articles that bring back memories of years past. Many are surprised when they find information about themselves or their relatives. Researchers are also delighted to find articles to help them in their quest for area history or ancestry information.
The Vernon County Museum is regularly open Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 12 P.M. to 4 P.M. in the winter and open every day except Sunday in the summer (same hours). No fee is charged but donations are accepted. Phone the Museum at 608-637-7396 for possible changes in the schedule.
Entry compiled by Sloan Komissarov.
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