Daily Sitka Sentinel

New Museum To Hold Old Sitka Stories

By BRIELLE SCHAEFFER

Sentinel Staff Writer

Life-size models of Prince and Princess Maksoutoff, a changing digital display of Sitka’s landscape, and an interactive exhibit on how Sitka’s past influences its future will be part of the new Sitka History Museum in Harrigan Centennial Hall.

There also will be space for temporary exhibits highlighting other periods of Sitka’s past, such as World War II, when Sitka was part of the Pacific theater of the war, said Kristy Griffin, museum curator of collections and exhibits.

And that’s just in the gallery, she told Chamber of Commerce members at a luncheon Wednesday at Westmark Sitka Hotel. 

The new Sitka History Museum will have storage for objects, office space and a research room as well.

“It’s going to be absolutely beautiful,” Sitka Historical Society Executive Director Hal Spackman said. “The important thing about this museum is it tells all of Sitka’s stories.”

The museum is slated to open next summer, just in time for the 150th anniversary of the transfer of Alaska claims from Russia to the United States, he said.

But the organization still needs to raise money to finish funding the new space. The museum has $340,000 to go to reach its goal of $680,000.

“We’re really hopeful we can get that,” Spackman said. “We’re close because we have a couple funding requests in right now.”

The museum contracted with HealyKohler Designs of Washington, D.C., to lay out the gallery. The firm’s credits include work on the Library of Congress and the Washington Monument, Griffin said.

Representatives of the design firm visited Sitka last year and also took suggestions from the community in designing the museum space. There will be partitions that rise and fall to mimic the mountains around Sitka, Griffin said.

The front of the museum will have a space for greeters before visitors are ushered into the first permanent exhibit, which is on Tlingit history, the Great Northern Expedition and the Russian-American Company, Griffin said.

The second exhibit will cover Russia’s presence in Alaska and the economy, culture and daily life in Sitka in the 1800s. The next section will be about the transfer and why Russia decided to sell. The fourth gallery will cover Sitka after the transition and through the granting of civil rights to Alaska Natives. The fifth and final permanent exhibit will focus on the future, Griffin said. 

The exhibits will really showcase the interconnections of all peoples here, she said. 

In order to populate the new exhibits, museum staff members have been refining the collection of artifacts, photos and other objects. The old museum was closed in July 2015 for the Centennial Hall renovation and since then the staff has spent thousands of hours combing through its holdings, which have been in storage.
“We ask ourselves does this object actually belong in our collection?” Griffin said. “Does it tell Sitka’s story?”

Staff has been entering objects into a digital database to make them instantly searchable. It may take a museum staffer 15 to 20 minutes to catalog “an easy object,” recording its description, condition, donor information and other relevant information, she said. More difficult ones take hours. 

The process of removing an item from the museum collection is called “de-accessioning.” An item may be de-accessioned if it is a duplicate of one already in the museum, or is judged as not contributing to the museum’s mission, Griffin said. Often these surplus items are donated to other organizations.

“It makes me happy to get objects to a better area where they can tell great stories,” Griffin said. 

She said there is no apparent reason for some items to be in the museum, such as a mechanical pencil. 

“It might have fallen into a box of donations and we accidentally accessioned it,” Griffin said.

Over the past year, the museum has added 6,360 new objects to the database and removed 250, Griffin said. And they still have other off-site storage areas full of items to go through. 

The museum has launched a new website, and secured several grants to purchase local artwork, manage its collection and incorporate multimedia in its exhibits during the temporary closure.

 An artist’s rendering shows one of the proposed exhibits in the Sitka History Museum. (Graphic Provided)

 Kristy Griffin (Sentinel Photo)