Holiday Gift Ideas – Archival Items
This time of the year I occasionally receive a few emails requesting items from our gift shop to be shipped out for holiday gifts. We have always had the Museum Store tab on the Chik-Wauk website but we have never developed it past that point. We are just in the starting stages of the online store but you can now visit the Chik-Wauk website and view some of the items we will have for sale this winter season. We will be adding some books and a few more DVD’s to the selection in the next coming weeks.
With the additional of new Administrative Building, we now have a place to store our gift shop items for the winter as well as our sensitive archival items. In the past we have actually had to turn away some important archival items because we did not have a proper storage area in place to house these artifacts.
When Chik-Wauk Museum and Nature Center opened back on July 4, 2010 we had the 2000 square ft museum packed to capacity. The end of the 2016 season marked the seventh season we have been open to the public. We do recognize after being open for seven seasons we need to freshen-up some of the exhibits in the museum.
With the opening of the Nature Center this past year we were able to compliment that building with some of the natural displays that were located up in the Museum. Within the next five years we would like to highlight some other areas that did play a big part of the first pioneers that made the Gunflint Trail their home.
If you have an item you feel is just perfect for the Chik-Wauk Museum and Nature Center collection, we invite you to fill out an Artifact Donation Form. (Before submitting the form, you may wish to review our Collections_Policy to make sure the item really is a good fit for us.) Upon receiving your completed Artifact Donation Form, the GTHS acquisition committee will review your artifact and get back to you shortly about how we’d like to proceed with the donation process. If it is a larger item, we will ask you to commit to holding onto the artifact for the next five years. We may contact you at any time in those five years to officially receive the item into our collection.
There are a few items we will accept without going through the Artifact Donation Form process.
We are always accepting any historic photos, postcards, new letters, flyers, diaries or brochures from the Gunflint Trail that you would be willing to gift or simply loan so we scan them into our collection and then return the originals to you. Books are another item we accept for our reading corner, as long as they aren’t duplicates of books already on our shelves.
Don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions you might have about donating artifacts to the museum at info@chikwauk.com or 218-388-9915. The Gunflint Trail Historical Society’s goal is to preserve the history of the Gunflint Trail and its early settlers for residents, guests, travelers, and future generations and your photos, artifacts, and stories play an important role in that preservation.