WESTERN SKIES - July 16, 2005

*** MEEKER'S DREAM REALIZED ***

ERIC WHITNEY: In 2002 voters in Greeley approved a tax increase that would enable the city to, for the first time ever, open a comprehensive city historical museum in one location. That museum opens this week. KUNC's Brian Larson reports.

BRIAN LARSON: It's moving day for the new Greeley History Museum.

And not since 1929, when the city purchased Nathan Meeker's two-story adobe home for Greeley's first museum, has the entire collection been in one centralized location.

CHRIS DILL: It's going to be on the order of fifteen hundred boxes that are only collections. And then we've got six offices moving over here as well.

LARSON: With arms folded across his chest, Museum Director Chris Dill watches nervously as movers and volunteers unload the boxes from trucks onto four wheeled, wooden dollies.

Until now, thousands of paper records, photographs and physical artifacts have been stored at three different sites around Greeley. Including second floors and backrooms at Centennial Village Museum and in the basement of the Senior Center.

A freight elevator is used to lower the collection into its new home in the former office building of the newspaper once published by Nathan Meeker.

DILL: We keep accumulating things because history doesn't stop happening. The houses and buildings at Centennial Village, and certainly this building, the old Tribune building, are artifacts in and of themselves. They're just too big to take home and put in a drawer somewhere.

LARSON: Built in 1929, the Greeley Tribune building was the newspaper's home for fifty-seven years before being vacated in 1985. Voter approval of a tax increase in 2002 allowed the city to purchase the building for four-point-six million dollars. A state historical grant helped to renovate the thirty-four thousand square foot interior.

Orchestrating the move has been the job of Collections Coordinator Erin Quinn. She's spent the past year, organizing, planning, cataloging, and doing lots and lots of packing.

ERIN QUINN: We had to recruit a lot of volunteers to help us pack. Plus, we were also trying to help patrons continue to keep the archives accessible for as long as possible. It took a lot of work, a lot of manpower. We have a record of the hours, although I couldn't tell what they are right now.

LARSON: In addition to seven thousand square feet of exhibit space in the upper level, there's six thousand square feet for storage in the museum's basement. It's currently a jumbled mess of boxes, buckets of paint, sawhorses and ladders.

QUINN: Everything needs to be properly housed and stored in a way that ensures its long-term preservation. That means that it's probably going to take us a really long time to be really settled. So, I have my work cut out for me. Job security.

LARSON: A lot has changed since 1870 when Nathan Meeker first dreamed of creating a utopian community on the plains of Colorado, based on the principles of temperance, religion, agriculture, irrigation, cooperation and family values.

But sharing the rich and colorful history of Greeley through those "common treasures" that Nathan Meeker once wrote of is something that Museum Director Chris Dill is looking forward too.

DILL: This happened to be the plow that was brought along by one of the original settlers that was borrowed by the city so that they could show everybody where they were supposed to be finding their lots. They just laid the streets out. They plowed'em up. It's the kind of wonderfully odd thing that we haven't had a place to exhibit before.

LARSON: When everything is settled, The Greeley History Museum will be home to over fifty thousand artifacts, eighty thousand photographs, and over seven thousand books, with plenty of room to grow.

For Western Skies, I'm Brian Larson.