With the COVID-19 pandemic, the Knox County Historical Society, like many organizations, has had to make a lot of adjustments — including closing its doors to regular visitors.
But James Gibson, the museum director, said that members are still active, preserving and celebrating the county’s history.
With regular visitor hours on pause due to the pandemic, what has the Historical Society been up to?
Because so many people were spending time at home, organizing closets and cleaning out garages, most of our early contacts by telephone and email were from persons wishing to make donations of items relating to Knox County history. A Texas retiree sent several boxes of photographs and other items pertaining to Cooper Bessemer history. Two donors brought us very nice Native American artifacts found in our county. Other items include history and photographs of Paul Lynde, Bladensburg School graduates, Howard churches, the Shellmar Corporation and local community concerts.
Are there any recent donations that particularly stood out?
A local resident brought us more than 40 issues of the annual course of study and calendar for the Seventh Day Adventist Academy — beginning from their first year, 1893. It’s a really, really nice group of these items, and they did not have them in their archives collection at the school. We’re considering them part of the museum’s collection, but we’ve made them available to the folks out there (at the academy’s archives) to make use of them whenever they want to.
How long has the historical society been active?
The Historical Society started in 1942, so we celebrated our 75th anniversary a few years ago. We have had the museum since the mid-1980s. We bought the building that we’re in now in 1985 or 1986, so we’ve been in that building for 35 years or so.
Is there currently any opportunity for private museum tours ?
We did a couple early on; we had a couple scheduled that we kept, although we canceled quite a few as well. But we’re not scheduling any group tours at the moment. Every year in the past we closed in December, January and February, because weather’s an issue and we don’t get a lot of visitors in, so we’re into that time now. We’re treating this the same as it was for the past seven or eight months. If people call, I arrange times to meet with them individually. We’ve had some people that wanted to do family research; we have a big collection of city directories and telephone books that go back 100 years, so we make those available to people. I’ve had people come individually and spend the afternoon, and we’re happy to do that.
Knox County Historical Society
875 Harcourt Road, Mount Vernon
740-393-5247
Hours: Currently closed except for specially-arranged events
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