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Celina Area Heritage Museum sprucing up for Memorial Day
By Penny Rathbun
Staff writer
The Celina Area Heritage Museum is getting a makeover.
When it is ready to face the public again it will have more display area and a miniature street. Museum patrons will be able to look through windows to see the “Celina Record” office as it looked in the '40s and '50s.
“We're planning now for permanent exhibits,” McKnight said. “We'll have a smaller area of rotating exhibits.”
The Celina Area Heritage Association bought the building at 211 West Pecan Street from Harlan Bridwell in the late 1990s. Bridwell owned the “Celina Record” at the time. The paper had been printed in that building for decades.
The heritage association opened the museum in the early 2000s. The old printing press, Linotype machine, and other newspaper printing equipment was never officially on display in the museum. It was just too heavy to move.
Temporary displays were on exhibit at the museum, changing two or three times a year. The museum had a Memorial Day display and a Christmas display.
An especially popular display one year was focused on Celina Bobcat memorabilia. That display included a golden yellow letter sweater from the World War II years. The sweaters weren't orange during WWII because the armed forces needed all the orange dye available.
Those rotating displays will still happen on a smaller scale. McKnight said the heritage association has decided to concentrate on the 1940s and 1950s for the museum's permanent displays.
Walls and windows have been built inside the museum to create a miniature street scene. The “Celina Record” office will be recreated. A mannequin dressed as the editor, green visor and all, will be seated at the Linotype machine.
“We wanted the museum to look more professional and more organized,” McKnight said.
He also believes in preserving the past. He said that a manual typewriter on display a few years ago in the museum was a hit with kids. “They played with that more than anything else,” he said. Most of them had not seen a manual typewriter.
“We've lost the artisanship of it. Think about what all it took to make a pocket watch and the machines that made them,” he said. “It seems like everything now always is driven by a computer.”
The museum is funded mostly by its affiliation with a bingo association in East Plano. Occasionally Celina Area Heritage Association members may raise funds for a special project such as the memorial honoring fallen soldiers on the square or the restoration of the Alla Hubbard statue.
The public can get its first look at the refurbished Celina Area Heritage Museum on Memorial Day when it will feature a Memorial Day display as it has every year since it has opened.
The museum also houses the Celina Chamber of Commerce.
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