Renovated Greenwood museum attracting more attention

Sometimes, it’s the smallest changes that have the biggest impact. If you want proof, just take a look at the Branstiter “Old Streets of Greenwood” Museum located at 600 S. Main Street on the south side of Greenwood. After getting a much needed facelift and repairs to the building’s roof, there have been a lot of visitors stopping by to comment or ask questions about the museum’s upgrade.

“It’s so much more noticeable,” said museum committee member Pat Lindner. “People come by and ask, ‘Did you guys expand?’ No, it’s just they’re able to see it better.”

The Branstiter Museum held a grand re-opening on July 11-12 to allow the public to see for themselves what has changed during the past year after the facility went through an upgrade. The changes for the museum came after the Greenwood City Council voted to improve the museum along with the community library and a new city hall facility in a $430,000 package back in in the fall of 2018.

For the museum, the most needed of these updates wasn’t the new sided exterior walls that have been attracting a lot of attention. That honor instead goes to the roof, which Lindner said was probably original to the building and had become dangerously leaky in the past few years.

“The first thing our committee decided we needed to buy was a new roof,” she said. “Every time we had a tour, or basically every time it rained, there would be new places that would open up in the roof.”

“We had to move around articles and newspapers every time it rained,” added Diane Wildish, another museum committee member. “We had a class reunion held here at one point and it rained. They had to help move stuff around to stop it from getting wet. It had gotten to the point where it was either shut it down or fix it.”

Besides the roof and the siding, Lindner said there were also windows added to the exterior of the building, but don’t expect to look though and see what is actually on the opposite side of the glass. That’s because the committee decided to print large posters of a few of the displays within the museum and have them placed neatly in each of the four windows. The photos are of the Doc Olson, Grassland Butter, Clark Electric and Baptist Church displays.

“There was a lot for us to do, decide the color outside, the trim and shingles,” said Lindner. “The windows are new, we have pictures of some of our displays in them, it’s pretty neat.”

Inside the museum, there have also been a few changes. Displays on laundry and antique dolls were added and a few new items were placed in displays that are already well established. One of the most obvious of these new items, Lindner said, is an assortment of historically dressed mannequins placed around the museum.

“We moved some things around, especially in the back room,” she said. “We’ve had some things brought up front. We’ve changed things a little bit, yet all the stuff here is the same.”

The Branstiter museum will be open on the first Sunday of each month from 12 p.m. until 3 p.m.

CHEYENNE THOMAS/STAFF PHOTOS