Exhibit items stolen from museum
(File photo/SUSAN DRINKARD) Hannah Combs, Bonner County History Museum’s administrator, stands near artifacts belonging to Sandpoint’s early-day influential women. Calendars from the exhibit, “The Women Who Shaped Bonner County” were among those items taken from the museum.
SANDPOINT — A receipt and a few calendars from an old, long-gone laundry. An old ad encased in plexiglass and attached to the wall.
Those items, along with a USB drive filled with historic logging and forestry photos from the community’s early days that had been inserted into a monitor to provide a running display, are what the Bonner County History Museum know are missing and taken over the past few weeks.
“It’s a part of our history that somebody stole and that’s really sad,” museum board president Ruth Wimberly told the Daily Bee.
A police report has been filed.
Wimberly said the items first noticed as missing were the calendars, dating back to the 1920s and promoting a laundry run by Myrtle Davis, the mother of Sally Transue, who donated the items to the museum for the “Women of Bonner County” exhibit. At first they thought it was a prank, but soon noticed that an ad and a laundry receipt — both encased in plexiglass and attached to the wall — were missing as well. They began checking other exhibits and found a USB drive — containing historic photos of the timber and logging industries — had been taken out of a monitor that displayed the photos as part of the forestry exhibit.
“We don’t know what else [is gone],” Wimberly said. “We have a lot of stuff that just sits. I guess we’ve always been trusting and we never had a problem.”
While items are irreplacable from a history standpoint, they aren’t valuable in terms of their monetary cost, Wimberly said. That’s why museum staff is wondering if it was part of a prank or a joke, where someone had taken the items to give to somebody else as part of an inside joke.
“A lot of the stuff that was taken isn’t valuable but it’s priceless and it tells our history and that’s what makes us so sad that somebody would come in and do this,” she said.
“Really, you’re going to steal from a museum?”
As best as the museum staff can tell, the items have gone missing over the last couple of weeks, Wimberly said. The museum also is in the process of doing a complete inventory of exhibits and items that were on display to determine what else, if anything, might have been taken.
The museum plans to close the week of Aug. 24 to reconfigure exhibits, secure artifacts, install more security cameras and recruit more volunteers to act as docents. They also are exploring the use of copies, instead of original documents, where possible “becasue we can’t trust that they’ll still be there,” Wimberly said.
The museum will be available for research requests and for people to drop off items for its yard sale on Sept. 12.
Wimberly said museum staff and volunteers were saddened by the thefts, by the loss of the community’s history by someone they fear will only dump the items. Their hope, instead?
“Call the museum,” Wimberly said. “We’d take them back, no questions asked. We’re hoping that somebody will have a guilty conscience and return them.”
If anyone has any information, they can contact the museum, no questions asked, at 208-263-2344.
Caroline Lobsinger can be reached at clobsinger@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @CarolDailyBee.