I don’t know how many residents have taken the time to visit the Palmer Museum,  located in the Palmer Visitors’ Center. It is a real treasure for our area with some great artifacts from our early Colonists and Native Alaskans.

As a volunteer there for the past several months, I would like to commend museum curator Geri McCann for the great job she does. She wears many hats performing her many and varied duties. Those include everything from giving visitors tours, answering questions about the history of the area, answering countless phone calls, scheduling artist workshops and enrolling students and performing all the accounting duties. She also does cataloging, displaying and preserving of artifacts and inputting all the information and reports to countless agencies. It is an exhausting, stressful job for one person.

She does this all the while working out of a small, cramped closet area with poor light serving as her office. At present, not more than two people will fit into the office at one time, and that requires maneuvering. The storage and display area for museum artifacts is cramped and has equally poor lighting.   Can’t we do better for our curator and the precious artifacts of our past? The Palmer Museum of Art and History desperately needs more room for displays, storage and the office area. If we can’t have a bigger museum, then at least let’s give our curator a work area sufficient for the tasks she performs and better lighting for the displays.

Summertime brings many visitors into our area with buses stopping at the museum for their first look at Palmer. Let’s give them a memorable impression of our community and its caring representation of our past history.

Virginia Blaine,

Palmer