Keeping Cheney’s ‘best-kept secret’

CHENEY – When an upstairs water pipe burst and flooded part of the Cheney Historical Museum in 2004, Joan Mamanakis offered to help clean up the mess. She soon became immersed in the history of the artifacts and fell in love with the place. Now she is one of the co-directors of the organization and very proud of its contents.

“This is Cheney’s best-kept secret,” says Mamanakis. “Everyone is always surprised, when they come, at how much is in here. It’s also unique, as we don’t have everything under glass. So you get more of a sense of the realness of the objects. People always comment when they come that it’s so much larger, and we have so much more in here that they didn’t expect.”

The museum displays relics from the Cheney, Four Lakes, Marshall, Tyler and Amber districts starting from the 1830s. It began in 1935 by the Tilicum Club, a women’s social and service group, when they were asked by original pioneer families to preserve historical items. Over the years the museum has changed locations and occasionally been in storage, but continues to rebound and grow.

“We’re always trying to make improvements and bring the museum up to the way people expect museums to be today,” says Mamanakis. “To tell a better story we’re doing research on the history of the community to bring new information.”

With three large rooms and about 1,700 square feet of display space, the museum features artifacts of the daily lives of regular people, including a pioneer home setting, a general store and a schoolroom. There is a barn room, with farm tools and outdoor equipment. A military display contains artifacts from the Civil War through the Vietnam era.

“What I take a little pride in with this museum is that we were farm people, middle-class, working-class people, and a lot of artifacts that we have are from the daily lives of real people like you and me,” says Mamanakis. “They made their butter and milked their cows and sold it to the stores in trade for shoes for the kids and things like that.”

The oldest item displayed is a place setting of dishes from a pioneer family who arrived in 1832. The school bell that the very first teacher in Cheney rang in 1878 at the first Cheney school, hangs proudly in the schoolroom.

The newest pieces are from the 1960s and 1970s, as there are certain items that they collect through time, such as the military artifacts. All the items are donated and must be from people who owned or used them in the Cheney area. It’s a constant source of detective work, as Mamanakis researches to find the uses and dates of tools and artifacts. Moreover, some of the tags were torn off in the flood, so she tries to match labels and descriptions with objects.

“I’m still discovering things,” smiles Mamanakis. “There are things that I haven’t looked at that are in boxes in storage – surprises all the time. I’m working on cataloging everything in the museum. I joke about it being my life goal.”

The new exhibit this year is the Marriage Book project. The museum is collecting photographs of people who were married in this region, from pioneer times – the 1890s – up to modern times.

An all-volunteer organization, support is through the Tilicum Club and membership of Friends of the Cheney Historical Museum. In the future the museum volunteers plan to develop more online ability for research purposes. They also hope to keep entry to the museum free and expand educational possibilities.

“There’s so much potential here, with all the artifacts, for education,” says Mamanakis. “I’m hoping that if we can get a larger volunteer group that we can do more outreach programs.

“I just want people to see this. This is a hidden treasure. I just want people to know that it’s here and come here because they’ll be amazed.”