Grand opening planned for Fort Caspar Museum
by Carol Crump
Fort Caspar Museum is about a lot more than a fort.
The City-owned facility will host on Jan. 12 a grand opening of a major expansion designed to showcase its real mission: "Past to Present -- Discover Central Wyoming."
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"We're not a museum about the fort; we're about central Wyoming history, and we have a fort," said Museum Director Rick Young.
The close to $2 million project adds larger, more well-lit exhibition space, classrooms, exhibit storage and a multipurpose room that Young said already has been rented out for meetings and a wedding reception.
The 5,000-square-foot expansion was funded with $1 million from Optional One Cent #12 Sales Tax.
Additional money for the classrooms and exhibits came from a combination of Casper City Council funding and a grant from the Natrona County Recreational Mill Levy Joint Powers Board.
The remaining $450,000 was raised through a capital campaign that began last January.
"I'm excited we were able to raise the money," for a project that Young said shows the community's support for showcasing and interpreting central Wyoming history.
A donor wall in the lobby honors the contributors who gave from $100 to $10,000 to the expansion. Young still is accepting donations and exploring grants for approximately $100,000 of additional audiovisual equipment and museum-specific storage systems.
The museum also actively collects central Wyoming history to add to its collection, including materials that may be historic in 50 or 75 years.
A strategic planning process in 2000 identified the need for more space for the facility's collections of photographs and large and small items from businesses and community members.
The discussion also reinforced the need to be more to the local community than a site for the reconstructed fort and ferry crossing.
"What do we want people to see? What do they expect to see? And what do they need to see?" about the history of central Wyoming asked Young, who is in his 23rd year at the fort.
What's on display?
Young, who will serve as president of the Mountain Plains Museum Association for the next two years, said the resulting expansion will be a new thing for Casper: a place that focuses on being a repository for the history of those who left their mark on Central Wyoming with what they left behind.
The site is now "the best of a lot of worlds" that makes it a place to visit year round, he said.
The new space includes an educational gallery that will rotate items from the permanent collection on a regular schedule.
Two interns from Texas Tech will be working on putting together displays that are related to central Wyoming, beginning with the Native American headdresses, gloves, shirts and moccasins that are part of the museum's collection.
"We'll get a lot more of the collection out," Young said.
The permanent exhibit space - which Young said is not really permanent since the items in each storyline will change five or six times a year - includes a progression of the area's history from prehistory to 1988.
The exhibits and new hands-on activities move from early geology into site-specific information about the fort, the ferry crossing and the telegraph.
The indoor display complements the fort buildings and the place of the frontier Army in westward expansion.
There is no duplication or competition with information at the National Historic Trails Center, Young said.
The timeline moves forward from the first settlements in 1888 in time increments based on central Wyoming's booms and busts.
The story is illustrated with professionally displayed objects from each time period and pictures and artifacts from buildings that were built at the time.
A touch screen lets the user view a five-minute clip of the county's history and each of its communities, including abandoned towns like Eadsville and Copperopolis.
The oil and gas industry section includes two pods to illustrate the area's refineries and the early oilfields with clips from the National Archives.
Among the focal points of the agriculture and ranching sections are a sheep wagon built in Casper by Schulte Hardware and panels that tell the story of the Goose Egg Ranch and "Cattle Kate" Ella Watson.
Admission will be free to the grand opening celebration on Jan. 12 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The open house will include the Beeson family, with current State Junior Fiddle Champion Anastasia Beeson playing old-time fiddle music. A children's fiddle music group, All Together Now - Just Fiddling Around, also will entertain.
Refreshments will be provided by the Fort Caspar Museum Association.
Pictures of the new exhibits and expansion are posted on the fort's Web site, www.fortcasparwyoming.com, or call 235-8462 for information.