Residents recall past like it’s yesterday
Amazing things are in the Spokane Valley Heritage Museum. An air raid siren, antiquated wooden theater seats, a kiddy stagecoach ride and the inner workings of a dial telephone are some of the interactive exhibits that delight visitors.
Since opening in August 2003, the museum has whetted the historical appetites of more than 1,200 visitors. “We’re growing,” said Jayne Singleton, the museum’s curator who’s in awe of its progress and the dream that inspired it.
“I was going to Spokane Falls Community College in 1988, and I had a dream one night but it felt like I was there.”
In the dream, Singleton, wearing a 1920s dress, stepped off an old railroad car in Liberty Lake. In the distance was a large lighted dance hall with music and dancing.
Singleton, a “California girl” and resident of Spokane’s North Side at the time, had never read any history of the area. Intrigued, she relayed the dream to a professor. “I said, ‘Isn’t that weird?’ and he replied, ‘Well, no. There was a dance pavilion at Liberty Lake.’ ”
The rest, as they say, is history. “I was driven. I definitely have a passion for it, and everything in my life led up to it,” Singleton said about pursuing the concept of a museum.
The museum has a quaint, comfy feel that Singleton and volunteer Lois Cunningham believe are winning elements. “It feels like your visiting somebody’s home,” Cunningham said.
A museum curator spends plenty of time with the dead, but Singleton doesn’t mind. “I have a huge family is what it feels like,” she said. “There’s a lot of inspiring stories from John Q. Citizen that need to be told.” Occasionally, however, she meets history face to face.
Like the time volunteer Chuck King found albums containing unnamed photos of the Van Marter family whose 1906 mansion is on the corner of University and Valleyway. “I said, ‘Someday somebody will come in and tell us who’s who,’ ” Singleton said.
One week later, 90-year-old Mary Margaret Van Marter walked into the museum. “We got out the books, and she named the people in the pictures. At one picture she turned to me and said, ‘I hated that dress,’ and there she was in the photograph in that dress.”
Another time, Singleton was talking with a woman visiting the museum. “She said something about Dishman and I said, ‘Were you raised in Dishman?’ And she said, ‘No. I am a Dishman.’ That’s the way it always happens around here.”
The museum is a destination spot for schools, scout troops, retirement homes and out-of-town visitors. “We have a lot of repeats, and that’s exciting.”
Singleton and Cunningham cite the interactive exhibits and the three-month rotation of the main exhibit as the reason for repeat visitors. “We’re constantly in a state of flux, and that’s our mission to always have something new.”
“United We Stood,” a recent World War II exhibit, “was loaded with emotion,” Singleton said. “It was a time when everybody was behind the war effort so we did a 1940s living room and the gold star in the window for the mothers who lost their sons in the war. One veteran came in and started talking, and he just bawled. He had never talked about it before. Then I started crying.
“There’s a lot of emotion with history, and this exhibit really resonated with the older people.
“There’s wonderment here, there’s awe, there’s sad emotions and happy emotions but overall there’s a lot of connecting going on here,” Singleton said.
And with each new exhibit comes the research. “There’s so much more to the story then the watered down versions in the text books.”
Currently, a fire fighter exhibit is under construction. Future exhibits will include Playfair and the Vietnam War. “I want to hear from them (Vietnam vets). That’s the same way we approached the World War II exhibit. Overwhelmingly it was their experience they wanted to show. They wanted it to be about America and the war.”
On Saturday the museum will host a Hot August Night fundraiser in the parking lot. For $15 per person visitors can travel back to the 1950s drive-in theater days with music, food, cars and ice cream. “It’s going to be the funnest fundraiser we’ve had,” Singleton said.
The museum’s directors are grateful to the community. “I could talk for hours about what we needed and how it got answered.”
They’re also eager to hear from the public about new exhibits. “We invite them to share with us what type of exhibits they want to see,” Singleton said.
“The museum belongs to everybody,” Cunningham added.