Jan 8, 2019 6 min read

The Greene County Historical Society’s new year resolution is to rejuvenate the museum, and its starting with a new face in the position of museum director.

Matt Cumberledge of Brave was hired by the society’s board of director in mid-December to take over as museum director. Cumberledge now wants to focus on community engagement, changing up exhibits and dusting off and displaying books and other items that have been boxed up for years.

“There are a lot of improvements to be made,” Cumberledge said. “But I like a challenge.”

One major change at the museum, located at 918 Rolling Meadows Road in Franklin Township, will be putting together a library. The old boiler house behind the museum was renovated more than a decade ago, with the intention of turning it into a library for the museum’s books, documents and other materials.

“It’s been set up to be a library, but it just never came to fruition,” Cumberledge said. “Books are just stacked up in boxes, and they’ve never been cataloged or anything.”

Cumberledge said the library will have everything from books, handwritten journals and photo albums to documentation on local families, census records and newspaper archives dating back to the 1920s. Cumberledge said he’s not sure why the materials sat for so long or why the library project was never pursued or completed.

“We don’t even know what all we have in there,” he said. “It’s going to be a task, but it’s a task worth doing. It’s one of the things I’m personally very excited about. It’s going to take a while, maybe six months to a year. We have a few volunteers plugging away at it now.”

Two of those volunteers are Kelley and Chris Hardie.

“We had several volunteers working in the library, but they didn’t have the skills or materials to develop the catalog and archiving system,” said Kelley Hardie, who is the president of the historical society’s board of directors.

In the past few months, they’ve been working with Rea Redd, from Waynesburg University, on catalog and archive systems for the library.

Within the year and a half that Kelley Hardie has been involved with the museum, she said she seen “major transitions in a positive direction.” However, the museum’s nonprofit status was revoked in May due to an error on its most recent tax filings, although Hardie said they are already on their way to being reinstated.

Hardie said the previous director, Eben Williams, was responsible for filing the taxes. He resigned the position in the fall, after which, Hardie discovered that the 501©3 status had been revoked. She said that the issue with the tax filing was unrelated to Williams’ resignation.

“There was no connection from that to why he left,” she said. “He wanted to move back home to be with family and friends.”

Williams could not be reached for comment.

George (Bly) Blystone, a 40-year volunteer at the museum and former board member, said he is pleased with the changes and is hopeful Cumberledge will bring positive results.

“We just keep finding things that were donated and it’s just sitting in a box right now,” Blystone said. “It just really makes a bad name when someone is donating things but they never hear back and don’t know what happened to it.”

Blystone said Cumberledge is the first museum director who’s from Greene County.

“If you’re not from Greene County, in some cases, you just won’t care as much as Matt does,” he said.

The museum is closed to the public through April, largely because most of the building is not heated. Cumberledge said getting heat in the building complex is one of his long-term goals. Over the winter months, he plans to do some cleaning and organizing in the facility, as well as some maintenance things to make the museum “as presentable as it can be.”

“It’s an old building,” he said. “It just needs some TLC.”

Cumberledge started posting “artifacts of the week” on the museum’s Facebook page, with a brief history lesson on items in the museum. He’s also talked about possibly starting a YouTube channel for the museum, which would feature short talks and tours of interesting places in Greene County and the history behind them.

“We want to put ourselves out in the community more, and make ourselves a little more relevant to Greene County people today,” he said.

Hardie said they plan to launch a history speaker series in the spring and “change things up” with new show rooms and exhibits. Cumberledge said the museum has a collection of Native American artifacts that he wants to display, and he’d also like to have some interactive things for visitors to do in commemoration of Archaeology Month in October. He also said he’d like to have some sort of Whiskey Rebellion festival, like Washington County.

“Greene County was very involved in that,” he said of the insurrection during the early 1790s that spread across the region just before the county formed in 1796.

Hardie said they’ve recently applied for a grant to develop a historical walking trail on the museum grounds. The trail will be mulch and stone where the stream is and will connect to the new World War I memorial that was built in the fall, following a history project that resulted in two books co-authored by Glenn Toothman and Candice Buchanan.

Hardie said she’s working with Toothman to have Memory Medallions along the walk that would provide the visitor with information on a historical person, place or event. She said she hopes to launch the opening of the historical walk in October for their annual Harvest Festival, which is their largest fundraiser.

“That will really bring in both local and outside visitors to the museum, and it will be both educational and recreational,” she said.

On April 27, she plans to have the museum’s first “Blast from the Past 5K” on the museum grounds, followed by a pancake breakfast. She said there will be Civil War re-enactors throughout the course and a smaller race for children under 13 years old.

“My vision is for the museum to be a community affair where people participate,” Hardie said. “We just want the whole community involved.”