Museum, fair boards have productive meeting on fairground items

The H. Earl Clack Memorial Museum and the Great Northern Fair boards met Thursday evening to start drawing up a memorandum of understanding for museum properties on the fairgrounds.

“The reason for our meeting tonight is to come up with a memorandum of understanding between our two boards, so we can work together because that’s what we need to do,” H.Earl Clack Museum Board Chair Lela Patera said.

The boards set up plans for storing or moving items by the end of the meeting, with H. Earl and Margaret Turner Clack Memorial Museum Foundation Baord Chair Elaine Morse saying she would draft the discussed items into a document.

At the end of the meeting, the chairs of both boards said it went well.

“I think this was a productive use of our time,” fair board Chair Tyler Smith said.

“Bottom line is, let’s just work together and be friends,” museum board Chair Lela Patera said.

Some of the museum items on the fairgrounds discussed were a Great Northern Railway caboose and its contents, the Faber Schoolhouse and its contents, a green-and-white covered chuckwagon with a hitch, a game bird collection stored in a building on the fairgrounds, a coal mining display, the carpeted platforms and beams.

Farm equipment owned by the museum is stored near the schoolhouse and the museum’s Homestead Shack.

“The first issue that kind of  brought this … is (the museum) adding more farm equipment to the Faber Schoolhouse,” Smith said.

He said he would like to have an understanding of how many pieces are coming and whether or not the museum board plans on taking some of those pieces when they move the museum to its new location on the 10 Block of Fifth Avenue, or if their home is indefinite on the fairgrounds or what the museum board’s intentions are.

The museum and foundation board members said they don’t know when the new museum location will be opened, and they continue to work on it.

Morse said the space at the fairgrounds probably could be better utilized.

“There is a space between the garage area and the Homestead Shack that I think they actually could have quite a bit of the equipment put in and would not impede on driving around the barn and stuff and it would be little more contained,” she said.

Smith added that he wants that containment and is looking for one central location and he doesn’t want the equipment in multiple locations.

The museum board members agreed and said the equipment won’t be on the fairgrounds long-term.

Former Northern Agricultural Research Center Superintendent Gregg Carlson went to the fairgrounds and made a list of farm equipment inlcuding a hand potato planter, one bottom plow, two rope horn planters and more, Morse said. All of that 1920s was donated by the Tow family, she added.

The caboose that has been on the fairgrounds since 1985, donated by the Havre area the Chamber of Commerce, is owned by the fair board, meaning they have to take care of it, but it can stay on the fairgrounds, the groups agreed.

The game bird collection that is in a glass cage with a painted mural background holding 10 birds in the case and 11 on top of the case can stay on the fairgrounds till the museum board has more space open in the history center, Smith said.

The coal mining display includes not only a coal car wagon and trolley car with additional machines on the car and a wagon wheel, rock drills and picks coal, and various “iron pieces” that are stored in or on coal car wagon. The boards agreed to keep it on the fairgrounds till more space is opened in the history center, but plan on getting it moved within the next 12 months.

Discussed lastly, carpeted platforms and beams are stored in the back of the fairgrounds building that holds the new fairgrounds office. That will be left and then moved in the same timeline as the coal mining display, the groups agreed.