Historians to shutter museum in Gassville
Posted on Monday, May 5, 2008
GASSVILLE — The decision to shutter a tornado-ravaged museum has delivered another stinging blow to a town transformed forever by Mother Nature.
The Baxter County Historical and Genealogical Society announced plans last week to close the county’s Heritage Museum, a building listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The museum has sat idle since a Feb. 5 tornado tore off part of its roof. The storm killed one person, injured 10 others and destroyed 73 buildings in this Ozark Mountain town of 2, 000.
Somber Baxter County residents shuffled in and out of the building last week, picking up historical artifacts donated to the museum after it opened in 2000.
The museum’s holdings include items like letters and records, photographs and postcards and clothing and tools that shed light on Baxter County’s rich history.
Most won’t be claimed, however, and the society expects to place thousands of pieces in storage.
Tommeye Reubin retrieved a quilt and dress made by her great-grandmother, an early settler in Baxter County around the turn of the previous century.
“It feels like I had a favorite aunt die in the nursing home, and I’ve come to get all her stuff and take it out,” Reubin said as she carried out her family heirlooms. “It’s not fun.”
Dr. William Rollins built the structure in 1923 to serve as the county’s first hospital. At that time, the nearest hospital was about 50 miles away in Harrison in Boone County, said Catherine Abel, the society’s president.
The plan to close the museum — with the expectation that the building will be demolished and sold to a developer — has shaken many Gassville natives, Mayor Danny Smith said.
Many of the town’s older residents feel a personal attachment to the building after visiting the hospital as children.
“Some of the older folks were born there,” Smith said. “It’s a symbol of Gassville for them.”
The society bought the building in 1995 from the U. S. government for $ 500, which was donated by Rollins’ grandchildren, said Gene Garr, former society vice president and longtime member.
The group spent the next seven years raising the nearly $ 50, 000 needed to rehabilitate the structure.
Contractors and society members volunteered hundreds of hours of work to the project. Inmates from the Baxter County jail and the Arkansas Department of Correction North Central Unit at Calico Rock in neighboring Izard County helped out.
The 7, 000-square-foot building had a room devoted to genealogy, another to Baxter County towns, another to railroad history and yet another to the military.
Two of Abel’s favorite items are a U. S. Army uniform from the War of 1812 and a. 38-caliber revolver used in the 1892 shootout that killed Abraham Byler, the first sheriff of Baxter County.
The museum was something to be proud of, Abel said.
Now, it’s clear the museum has seen better days.
The tornado, an EF 2 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale with winds between 111 and 135 mph, passed right by the museum, taking much of the roof with it.
Rain poured through the holes, destroying part of the ceiling and flooring.
Contractors later found many of the rafters were rotted, the exterior walls needed work and all the windows had to go.
Insurance would cover the roof, ceiling and floor damage, but the society would have to pay for the rest itself. That work will cost more than $ 30, 000, Abel said.
That’s money the society doesn’t have. It spent the last of its savings on a $ 4, 000 steel support beam keeping part of the roof from collapsing.
Faced with repair bills it cannot pay, the society membership voted April 22 to close the museum permanently and sell the property. Abel announced the decision to the public in a story last week in The Baxter Bulletin, where she offered to return the museum’s holdings to the original donors.
Abel expects interest in the building from developers, who crave property along busy U. S. 62, the main route to tourism magnet Mountain Home, about 10 miles away. Abel thinks anyone who buys the property would bulldoze the museum and rebuild from the ground up.
This doesn’t please society members, but Glenda Bodenhamer, the society’s treasurer, said closure was the only decision that made financial sense.
Even during good times, Bodenhamer said, the museum ate up too much of the group’s limited resources.
The museum did not charge for admission, so operating money had to come from about $ 6, 000 the society receives each year in membership fees, stipends from Gassville and Baxter County, and donations, Abel said.
In recent years, Bodenhamer said, the museum consumed the society’s entire budget. That was not the membership’s intent when they voted to open the museum, she said.
“Our monthly meetings have kind of been like going to church on Sunday with a minister who goes to the pulpit and preaches about finances all the time,” she said. “The only things we talked about were where to get the money to make this repair and that repair.
“ We hate to give up the building, but things have to change.”
Smith said the society should donate the museum to the city, which in turn could rehabilitate it and keep it open. Smith said he would seek grant money for the improvements, and if he can’t raise it, he’ll have city workers do the repair work themselves. Abel said she’d take the proposal to the membership after she speaks with the mayor.
One stumbling block may be the fact that some members want the museum reopened in Mountain Home someday, thinking that a more central location in Baxter County would increase attendance. There are already plans to relocate the museum’s archives, which contain hundreds of genealogical records, to a county-owned building in Mountain Home.
But Smith said he doesn’t want another building to fall victim to the twister. Gassville has already lost enough to the tornado.
The twister crossed the valley southwest of town and hit the Sunny South Mobile Home Park first at 5: 13 p. m. Feb. 5.
The winds rolled some mobile homes on top of one another and exploded others, destroying 41 units in all and killing 77-yearold Betty C. Fischer.
The tornado, which turned the sky around it yellow with torn insulation, headed northeast from there, carving a path of destruction from one end of town to the other.
The terror lasted no more than 30 seconds, Smith said, but still destroyed 73 properties in all, including 18 along U. S. 62.
Many residents are still repairing.
Most days, there’s someone putting shingles on a roof or installing new windows in a building on nearly every block.
On Cotter Road, just north of the mobile home park, Bill Johnson was on his hands and knees in a hole in his flooring, moving earth out of the space below to clear room for the new plumbing he’s installing.
Johnson is rebuilding much of his home’s interior after the tornado tore off part of the roof and rain laid waste to the home.
The family watched from the front porch as the tornado tore through Sunny South, which sits across a pasture from their home.
“It looked kind of like a wall of water. Then I got to hear the noise from it, and I realized then it was something else, and we needed to find some cover,” he said. “It sounded like a jet engine.”
Others have opted not to rebuild. Smith said 166 people have already left town.
Most property owners along U. S. 62 that suffered tornado damage are opting to demolish what’s left of their homes and sell to developers.
Paula Flippin, who owns the Rim Shoals Resort on the White River between Gassville and Mountain Home with her husband Gary, said the commercial development on U. S. 62 is going to alter the town’s small-town feel sooner than many residents expected.
“The whole physical structure of Gassville has changed now forever. It’s done. It’s gone,” Flippin said. “[The museum’s closure ] is just one more thing.”
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