A new steward of Palmer’s history

PALMER — Sam Dinges is working with what he’s got, or rather, what Palmer has had for a hundred years — history.

Dinges took the job as executive director of the Palmer Museum on Feb. 19 after the departure of Selena Ortega-Chiolero. Dinges will work on revitalizing the history of the Matanuska Colony and beyond at his new position with the Museum.

Dinges brings experience from the Wasilla Museum, the Anchorage Museum, the UAA archives and the Palmer Library to the Executive Director position. Dinges is still currently working on his library sciences advanced degree, but was excited to get the job.

“I’m pretty happy to be here,” said Dinges.

Dinges is beginning to oversee the two things that he says the museum offers — space and cool stuff. With a severe limit on space, he’s focusing on the cool stuff. Dinges hopes to transfer the 10,000 photos in the museum basement to the Alaska digital archives or creating a website of their own for Valley history.

“We don’t have a lot of that space aspect, but photos are kind of nice because we can store them quite easily they do offer quite bit of representational history,” said Dinges.

Dinges is working on anything that gets Valley history more accessible to interested citizens, researchers, and the like.

“We try to get these stories from the community out so that they’re not just sitting on a floppy disk somewhere, but get these stories out so that people are hearing them and people are experiencing the history of Palmer,” said Dinges.

Dinges said that pre-Colony history is often overlooked, but that the homesteaders and Alaska Native inhabitants, prior to 1935, are something he would like to highlight in 2018.

“There's a lot that I did not know about Palmer and its history,” Dinges said. “I thought I was fairly well educated on the subject before I got here but there’s a lot to the town, especially before the colony. We tend to think that Palmer started at 1935 but there's quite a bit of interesting stuff homesteading wise and also with the Native Alaskans that were here before us. I think that’s a pretty rich and fascinating part of our history that not a lot of people know about.”

Part of Dinges’ duties as the Executive Director are to oversee the Midsummer Garden and Arts Faire, a summer celebration put on by the Museum. Dinges says that he fields five to ten calls a day asking questions or from vendors hoping to participate.

“It’s definitely worth it because we do have at least 50 businesses that are out there and represented,” Dinges said. “In a small town like Palmer, that’s big — fifty people getting out and into the community.”

Dinges also helps cultivate partnerships with the Colony House Museum, which has a premium on space and offers a living exhibit of what Colony life was like. The Palmer Historical Society is another group Dinges would like to work more closely with in the coming months. Museum staff is working on a traveling exhibit for MSBSD teachers to use within classrooms that is expected to be introduced in the Fall of 2018. Dinges has also been working with Radio Free Palmer, which has been broadcasting the ‘Untold Stories’ series, with the next episode to be presented at the Palmer Train Depot on April 15.

With all Dinges has on his plate as Museum Executive Director, being charged with the preservation of the historical artifacts that helped make the Valley, he is hoping to bring his previous experience with archives to the forefront of his daily activities to have a greater database of photographs of Mat-Su Valley history.

“The vision of the project is to get photos from all across the Mat-Su Valley. Different institutions get them here and get them available to the public, but they’re not doing a whole lot of good to anybody just sitting in the basement,” said Dinges. “I’m looking to get them out there so the community can use them, so that researchers can use them, so that people can see what the Valley was like 100 years ago.”