Museum eyes restoration

The Mason County Historical Society received a $3,000 grant from the Washington Trust to help restore the windows on its museum at 427 West Railroad Ave., formerly the home of Shelton City Hall and the Shelton Library.

The windows are the originals from the building's construction in 1914. The Valerie Sivinksi Grant is a start, with more money and perhaps volunteer help needed to finish the project, Executive Director Liz Arbaugh said in an interview with the Journal.

"They're in pretty bad shape," she said of the windows to the building, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. "You can restore them and they'll last another 100 years."

The columns outside the building also are aging. "They're wood," Arbaugh said. "They're starting to get moisture in them. They're not necessarily decaying yet, at least as far as I can tell ... but the wood is falling apart."

The City of Shelton owns the building. This fall, city employees put a coat of paint in parts of the exterior to slow the deterioration," Arbaugh said. "It got a Band-Aid," she said.

Anyone interested in making a donation to the project can contact the association at 360-426-1020 or [email protected]. The nonprofit is also conducting its annual fund drive for 2024.

Last week, the museum debuted the exhibit "The Photography of Dennis Meurer: Shelton 1968-1974." In his artist statement, Meurer writes, "One of the great advantages of photography lies in its ability to freeze a moment in time in great detail in a way that can be shared when it's convenient ... When I choose to start photographing Shelton around the mid-1960s, it was because of the work of the great photographers like Eugene Atget and Andre Kertesy that were published in books and magazines. Since they had photographed the cities where they had to live, what better way to do what they did but photograph my immediate environment of Shelton?"

"These photos are amazingly good and unique to Shelton," Arbaugh said.

As for the museum in 2023, "We had a very good year," she said. "After COVID, we're seeing a lot of visitors. We're seeing a lot of local people discovering the museum for the first time."

About one quarter of the 4,000 museum visitors this year live within a 50-mile radius, Arbaugh said.

"Some have families in the area, some are just curious why Shelton is here," she said. The answer: the timber industry and mills.

The museum has four part-time employees, including Arbaugh, who comes in four days a week. Jan Parker is the curator, and Lindy Parker and David Larson are researchers.

The association recently partnered with the group Maritime Washington, part of the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation. The goup wants to preserve the state's saltwater shoreline.

"We have so much of that in Mason County, so I think that's exciting," Arbaugh said.

The association's annual car show will be co-hosted with the Downtown Merchants Association on June 30.