Printer-friendly versionSend to friend

As part of the state’s centennial celebration efforts, the Henry F. Hauser Museum will reopen Saturday with an assortment of displays and guest speakers illustrating life in the Sierra Vista area at the time Arizona was granted statehood.

More than 50 new photographs and other memorabilia have been gathered from partnering museums both inside and outside of Cochise County in what has been the biggest collaborative effort in the museum’s history, said Curator Nancy Krieski.

“This is the first time the museum has really stepped out and collaborated with all these other groups,” Krieski said.

Items from the Fort Huachuca Museum and the Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum represent some of the local partnerships, while Krieski had managed to gather items from the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson and as far away as the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, as well.

On Tuesday, the shelves and display cases inside the museum, normally filled with carefully arranged items from throughout the last century of life in the Sierra Vista area, now lay empty and open, awaiting the new collection of memorabilia for the project, titled “Our Little Corner of Cochise County — 1912.”

For the last two-and-a-half weeks, Krieski and the museum volunteers have been scrambling to move the regularly displayed items into climate-controlled storage and setting up completely new arrangements in preparation for Saturday’s open house.

The displays inside the museum are designed around articles printed in a booklet created by the Sierra Vista Historical Society. The booklet, from which the museum’s project gets its name, is filled with small essays by historical society members chronicling various aspects of life in the small communities and settlements in the area at the time Arizona became a state.

The booklets will be provided to visitors to the museum over the course of the celebration and is available free to download from the Sierra Vista Historical Society’s website, svhsaz.org.

Saturday’s open house event will also feature speaker presentations from historical society members in full costume and character, representing the land speculators, businessmen and other residents of the area in the 1910s.

“Our goal is to, when people step in here, to just take them back to that time,” Krieski said.

Originally conceived independently of the state’s centennial activities as a partnership with the Sierra Vista Historical Society, Krieski later submitted an application to the Arizona History Advisory Committee and was granted Legacy Project status, making Saturday’s open house, according to her, the only official Arizona Centennial Celebration project in Sierra Vista.

A mobile version of the museum’s display made up of storyboards will also make its way to the Sierra Vista Public Library, local schools, public parks, businesses and more throughout the year, she said.

Saturday’s open house begins at 1 p.m. at the Ethel Berger Center with the speaker presentations. The museum will open after, at about 2:30 p.m.

For more information, call the Henry F. Hauser Museum, located inside the Ether Berger Center, at 417-6980, or visit the Sierra Vista Historical Society’s website, svhsaz.org.