Sherman City Council to deside the fate of The Sherman Museum
Sherman Museum | August 12, 2016
After a summer of happy families filling the museum to see DINO DAYS, The Sherman Museum is facing the unthinkable – possible closure.
The Sherman Museum houses approximately 50,000 artifacts in two historic downtown Sherman buildings and provides exhibitions and programming year-round. In an economy where many museums are struggling and failing, The Sherman Museum is experiencing just the opposite – a rise in attendance and participation. During June and July of this year, nearly 3,000 visitors – many being millennials with their children – enjoyed the museum’s blockbuster summer dinosaur exhibition. The museum’s Texoma Time Traveler exhibit, added in 2015, has also proven to be a significant draw for museum visitors. However, despite the museum’s attracting nearly twice as many people as in the past and its growing popularity, the City of Sherman has now proposed, yet again, to cut the museum’s yearly support – this time down to $50,000.
“Amazingly, we managed to absorb the reductions when the city chose to lower its yearly support to $70,000, but we simply can’t absorb any more funding cuts,” said Board of Trustees President Bea Harmon. “Though $50,000 is a lot of money, it’s not nearly enough to operate a professional museum. Truth be told, $70,000 isn’t enough, but we somehow did it, all the while increasing the museum’s popularity.” Museum staff and board members all agreed that if this proposed support amount of $50,000 is adopted, it will be a killer – a killer of jobs, programming, tourism, and, very possibly, the museum itself.
When we explained the seriousness of this issue to the city, it modified its offer, somewhat. If the museum agreed to accept the public library’s genealogy collection (which will be without a home as a result of the library’s well-deserved renovations), the city would increase its offer to $80,000. Museum board members and staff carefully considered this proposition and were forced to reject it. It was determined that taking on the library collection would ultimately cost the museum an additional $20,000 to $25,000 annually in subscription fees, salaries, equipment and supplies, thus doing nothing to alleviate the museum’s current financial needs. The adoption of the genealogy department – which takes up approximately 2,000 square feet – would cripple the museum’s mission further by requiring the entire downstairs area of the museum, thus eliminating all of the museum’s downstairs exhibits and its community room where special programming is held on a frequent basis. This would be catastrophic to the museum’s tourism efforts which, according to city leaders, must be the number one priority.
The Sherman Museum continues to serve the community as the city’s only tourism option with regular weekday and weekend retail hours. The museum is scheduled to be open 208 days in 2016, which is approximately 1,500 hours of being open to the public.
As far as the museum’s tourism efforts, in the past two months, visitors have come from 18 states – Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. In addition, the museum recorded guests from 25 locations in Oklahoma and 71 locations in Texas! Many of those visitors bought items from the museum store where they paid sales taxes that directly aid the city tax base. No doubt a lot of those guests shopped and dined locally, and a number stayed in hotels. All in all, the museum staff and board members are confident these museum guests made a sizeable contribution to the local economy.
Museum Director, Dan Steelman noted, “We are hoping to convince city officials to revise the museum’s support level to a more realistic amount – with no strings attached. We believe $80,000 is close enough to the traditional support level to guarantee a fully functioning museum. Our desire is that the city will find the genealogy department a good home, but not at the expense of the museum.”
The museum will voice its opinions at a hearing to discuss the matter on August 15, 2016, at 5:00 p.m. in council chambers. We encourage all friends of the museum, folks who enjoy innovative events and exhibitions like History Comes Alive, DINO DAYS, Evening of Texana, and Texoma Time Traveler to rise up with us and let the city know that extinction is not an option for our vibrant museum.
About The Sherman Museum
The Sherman Museum is a non-profit 501(c) (3) educational organization devoted to collecting, preserving and interpreting objects of historical significance for visitors and residents of Grayson County and the Greater North Texas Region. The museum was previously known as The Red River Historical Museum prior to a name change in March 2011. For more information about The Sherman Museum contact us at www.theshermanmuseum.org.