Who are the members of the Gilmer County Historical Society and what do we do? How do we use the funds that we raise to provide value to the community and it’s members? Good questions, right?
First, we are all volunteers and we have no paid staff. We are a group of people who enjoy history, heritage crafts and community service! You probably already know the historical society is a non-profit organization, so all funds raised go right back into supporting the organization and maintenance of the buildings; but what exactly do we use those funds for besides administrative costs like pens, paper, and paying the utility bills? Right now the funds we raise manage to cover the bills. We pay the utility bills and liability insurance for the two buildings which we own. We receive no government funding. That’s pretty much it. We can’t really afford regular trash pick up, so volunteers take turns taking the trash home to put with their home trash. All of the pens, paper, administrative things like computers and printers, etc, are donated supplies and equipment, as are the equipment and supplies to run our heritage crafts programs. The items we sell in the gift shop for fund raising are handcrafted by our volunteers and donated to sell for fundraising purposes. The volunteers pay for their own supplies to craft these items and then donate the finished product to the gift shop at no cost to the historical society. It truly is a labor of love to keep our doors open!
That brings us to what value do we provide to the community? We have an excellent research library with resource documents not available anywhere else. I was recently looking thru a church ledger from 1867 of a local church that is no longer standing. It was an amazing look into the local area history! Items like this are one of a kind and only available to see in our library! However, we are working on scanning many of those items into PDF files and creating a digital library to preserve these very delicate documents. We offer free internet and computer stations for those needing to do historical research in our library building. We also have a large meeting space area and kitchen that other area groups like the Friends of the Gilmer Public Library and the Farm Bureau can use to have their meetings. This building we call “the annex” was once the kitchen and dining room for the Senior Center in town.
One of our most popular services is genealogy research assistance. We get a lot of phone calls and emails asking us if we have information on ancestors that they want information about. Our volunteers spend a lot of time doing free research in our library for those that are not local and can not just drop in and do the research in person. We often take photos of the documents we have in our library and email them to the requester for their files . Our volunteers have even been known to go out and find small family cemeteries in remote locations and take photos for the requester of headstones because they are not already on the Find-a-Grave website! Our volunteers do this on their own time and at their own expense. Again, it’s a labor of love!
We are really excited about being able to take all our old family photos that were stored in file cabinets to attempt to identify those in the photos with a little help from our area residents at the local Senior Center, as well as make those photos available online free for researchers.
Our main building is the Holt House which is located in front of the annex building. This building houses our museum and gift shop. We can use the house for programs, heritage craft classes, and other events. We enjoy hosting many visitors during events like the annual West Virginia State Folk Festival and special events like private tours and demonstrations for students from the local college and public schools.
Some of our volunteers also attend local craft shows to sell their donated crafts to raise funds for the historical society. They provide special events during the folks festival as well. We have had a variety of heritage craft demonstrations over the years in everything from candle dipping to rope making. We now own a 19th century barn loom that was set up by volunteers to be usable.
During holidays such as Halloween and Christmas, we decorate the museum exterior for the community to enjoy. In order to keep our utility bills as low as possible, our volunteers have purchased out of pocket items like solar powered lights. We continue to try and find ways to economize! We even looked at trying to find a grant to get solar panels for our building to generate our own electricity, but so far no luck on that. We do economize wherever we can so we can stay open for our visitors.
Like many non-profits and businesses, we took a hard hit during the COVID outbreaks. We used all our emergency funds that we had built up to pay the utility bills on the two buildings and were thankful for help from the Parkersburg foundation when we had no other option. We decided to establish a web site and started with a free version. Recently we were lucky to receive a grant from a local family who owns the Dan and Mila Reaser Family Foundation. They donated $5000 this past November 2021 in honor of Cecil Sherman Reaser Jr. (April 11, 1933 – July 3, 2021). Born and raised in Glenville, West Virginia, Cec was an active member of the Gilmer County WV Historical Society. His support and interest in preserving the history of his home town has been passed on to his son Dan and his wife Mila, grandson Danny, granddaughter Shannon and their immediate families. This gran has allowed us to upgrade our online presence to provide more services. Among those services are help with our photo collection, the online store which will open as soon as we are all trained to run an on-line store, and a members only, password protected page. As a thank you to our paid members who support us through annual and lifetime membership fees, we have set a goal to build our digital library, provide some free digital books, and provide quarterly newsletters to be sent out to our historical society members.
We appreciate all our supporters whether they donate cash, sign up with the AmazonSmile.com donation program, purchase books and hand crafted items, become annual or lifetime members, or donate their time with lots of in-person presence and elbow grease. Without those donations and hard working volunteers, we wouldn’t be able to provide these valuable services. Thank you to our supporters. We really do appreciate you!
