With artifacts ranging from the most delicate glass to epic structures the Prairie Museum of Art and History in Colby, Kansas, is a unique cultural experience on the Great Plains.

The Prairie Museum of Art and History in Colby is an excellent museum in northwestern Kansas.

In fact, it's one of the premier.

Very good.

It has super exhibits, it has super interpretations, and the grounds are incredible.

So it gives you a journey through time in Thomas County.

So there's a lot of things for everybody to see.

The curation is great, the research library is great and the people are friendly.

Mike Bond served as Thomas County Sheriff, but he's always been interested in history.

He's just a very good general historian, but specifically on the Smokey Hill Trail.

And he's been a major member on the board of the museum for many, many years and a member of the Thomas County Historical Society.

Well, the genesis of the Prairie Museum of Art and History is actually in 1959 and there was a group of bankers and businessmen that met with the Leisure Hour Club, and they formed the Thomas County Historical Society.

Then when the Pioneer Memorial Library was built, that's what they kind of utilized as their headquarters.

And then in 1971, they hired Helen Smith as the first director of the Historical Society.

1978, we acquired 24 acres out here and then in 1988, the Prairie Museum of Art History was built.

And since that time it's grown and we've offered all kinds of programing.

We focus on on education, on trying to get our youth involved in preserving our history.

And so we've got several outbuildings to demonstrate different areas of history.

Then 1975, the county acquired the Kuska Collection, a fantastic collection of Meissen China and dolls and memorabilia from from all over the world.

It's almost a Smithsonian quality material.

I'm Jenny Tracz.

I'm the assistant director of the Prairie Museum of Art and History here in Colby, Kansas.

The Kuska collection right now that we have on view is roughly about 10% of our collection that we have.

And that is a pretty normal museum standard.

Only 5 to 10% of your collection should be displayed at any one time, and 95 to 90% of it should be in storage, in safe storage conditions with archival housing and archival conditions.

A museum's biggest job is to care for the objects in their possession.

And it takes a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of space, and a lot of creative design.

We have automatic lights that turn on as guests walk through the gallery, and that is to keep light off of our collection.

Light damage is irreversible and it's something the only thing you can do is prevent it.

And one of the ways we do that is by motion sensored lights.

Oh, here's a neat feature.

When the lights turn on here, our lamps turn on, too, our our Tiffany lamps.

We have objects in drawers, which I really like.

You can just pull any of these drawers out and get a closer look at objects so you can lean over them.

They're protected, they're safe, and you can look at them at your leisure.

And we have a lot of really interesting objects, like money and pins and buttons and jewelry that otherwise are really hard to display and they're hard to get good viewing structures for.

And I really think that this is a great solution for that.

This is our Kuska Glass Gallery.

It is very popular, as you can see.

It is packed.

We have Art Nouveau, we have Art Deco.

We have just about every genre that you if you're a glass collector that you might be into, we have it.

We have a piece for everyone, if you will.

She really was thorough in her research and her collecting.

And it's beautiful, it's colorful, it's reflective, and it's nostalgic because a lot of people grew up having family dinners at home.

And for those special occasions, we got to have our China out.

And that makes this room nostalgic in a way that's different from other rooms because it brings back family time.

Sometimes history isn't always fancy, and sometimes you go to museums to see history and not just fancy things.

And this is a perfect example of normal, everyday containers that people would have used in their daily lives.

And it's really interesting to cast your mind back and imagine yourself in a in a day to day job, a day to day task of preparing a meal or helping your children to feel better.

And in doing so, you're using one of these lovely, beautiful containers.

This is our Meissen Glass display.

We have a pretty large collection of Meissen Glass.

I think often when we think of history, we don't think about decorative collecting.

But this is very much art, and I think it falls in both categories of art and history and exquisite craftsmanship.

Here we are at another really popular room in the Museum of Art History, and that is our toy gallery.

It is popular for very obvious reasons, and we have a working train and we have just about any toy you could possibly imagine or want or remember.

It's a great room for families, but it's also a great room for adults because it brings back a lot of memories of really fun times and fun play.

And it's it's really neat to see modern objects in a museum as well.

And I feel like our toy collection just nails it.

And you can still see old cars and old toys in in some of our drawers in here.

We have a large marble collection.

It's there's there's just something for everybody in this room.

Nellie loved collecting dolls.

As you can see.

It was kind of her thing.

And she has a lot of very rare dolls.

Many of these China dolls are exquisite, and the craftsmanship and the painting on them is secondary to none.

There's not very many museums that have doll collections like this and that adventure to put them on display.

This doll is a French bisque fashion doll, and she's dressed in original handmade lace and satin with accessories and including a genuine ermine cape, fan, beaded purse and pierced earrings.

And we believe this is one of Nelly's first dolls that she possibly got as a reward for learning her multiplication tables at age seven.

It is interesting to me because all of the dolls have period specific clothing on so we can date them by the clothing that they're wearing.

There are very few extant examples of clothing in western Kansas before the 1830s.

So these are unique in that we have extant examples of period clothing, much farther back than we do of most clothing on the prairie.

Most clothing was reused to make quilts and bedding.

And so we don't have a lot of good examples of 18th century clothing and 19th century clothing.

We have next to none of 17th century and before clothing.

So this is a very good example of history in context.

This is our furniture gallery that Nellie Kuska curated so beautifully.

And you can see we have a lot of examples of beautiful pieces.

This walnut and cherry sideboard was supposedly located in the governor's home in Kansas territorial capital of Lecompton, Kansas, and supposedly has a bullet hole in it from Quantrill's raid.

Which brings up an interesting point about provenance in the museum world.

We are always looking for provenance, and sometimes in historic museums, we don't have that.

We just have a story that was told.

We don't know if it's true and we don't know if it's not true.

We can do research for days and sometimes we still come up just with stories and myths, and that's okay.

It's still part of our history and we still like to show show that part of our history from our perspective.

She was a collector and she went to auctions and she, over her life, collected just about everything.

She bought it from from other private collectors as well as auctions.

She just was very thorough in all of her collecting.

It's a really it's a really neat collection to show off.

There's just something for everybody here.

You know, just such a vast array of things that she collected.

And they'd been to Canada.

They've been all over the world, ended up in California and had this huge collection and wanted to bring it back to Thomas County.

And so the commissioners at that time agreed to accept it and used the Thomas County Historical Society and eventually the Prairie Museum of Art and History to preserve that fantastic collection.

The Prairie Museum of Art and History is the major project of the Thomas County Historical Society.

So the museum operates under the authority of the board, and a decision was made that we would try to get representative structures that would show the public what it looked like in the 1930s and the proceeding years.

Okay, we're in the Nicol School.

This school building was originally located in Wendell Township, which is northeast of Colby, and it's representative of the early prairie schoolhouses.

And they housed the full range of grades from first grade to eighth grade.

The teacher had to get here early and fire up the stove, had to make sure that the water jar was full and it was responsible for maintenace.

The teacher would usually live with one of the families in the district.

We had at one time, I forget how many, it was a huge number of school districts in Thomas County, and each district had their own school board, schoolhouse and provided for the housing of the teacher.

My personal opinion is that this type of teaching for students was probably the best method we ever had because the older students could assist the younger students.

The younger students could hear the older students during their recitation period.

And with one teacher you had to rely on on all the students to help each other.

And it was a very good system.

Okay, we're in this sod house here at the Prairie Museum of Art History, and when the first people came out form the eastern states of the eastern part of the state one of the things that surprised them was the absence of trees.

But there was plenty of sod available.

So they adapted the Native American practice of utilizing what what they had on hand.

And so they learned to cut the sod and learn how to lay it properly.

And they were a very, very good structure to have.

Very warm in the winter time because the walls sometimes were three foot thick or at least two.

There wasn't a lot of amenities they had usually, you know, a cook stove and the implements they would have.

One of the prized possessions of the Pioneer family, and especially the lady of the house was to bring either a piano or an organ.

And a lot of them were abandoned on the route.

But the ones that made it through, they were very fortunate and they were prized in the household.

This is the Eller house.

It was owned by the Eller family that lived south of Colby, and it was brought in here to represent a typical 1930s house.

All of the houses that I have seen of that era had this beautiful woodwork, and that's something that you don't see a lot of anymore.

The wallpaper is very typical of that era.

Having the music available was important to the Pioneer family and especially during the 1930s when life was pretty rough.

You read the stories in the thirties and these beautiful lace curtains wouldn't have been much good because they had to do everything they could to seal the windows off.

And even when that happened, the dirt still sifted.

They put the plates on the table face down.

They'ed keep the food covered.

At night they would put muslin or tea a towel or something over the crib.

Originally, this was the Lone Star Presbyterian Church, and it sat about 13 miles up north east of Gem, Kansas.

And over the years, it's made several trips around the country.

And before it came here, it was ended up as a Pilgrim Holiness Church in Brewster.

And then ended up here.

The church and the school where the two main congregating areas of the community.

Before they had a church.

They would usually meet at a school if they had it or at a pioneer family's home.

And then finally they would they would build a church.

Of course, it has a bell that rings.

And you know, when I was a kid, we always... it was always a challenge for the kids to see who could get to ring the bell on Sunday mornings if the pastor would let you.

It's a quiet place for quiet place for reflection.

And so it's just a neat, neat place.

So as we turn this corner, we come into more of our local history.

Colby history.

And you can see we have a large collection of uniforms ranging from World War One, just a large collection of those.

And those are really important because we do like to honor our service members in the community.

And this is a great way to do that.

And it also gives you insight into a little bit of their daily lives, what what they had to use to survive.

And this is our honor to Colby schools.

This is a temporary display, all of these objects and here in this entire museum.

But we'll just take this case, for example.

They all have their own what we call an assession number.

So they each have their own number.

Think of it as like a barcode or a SKU number.

And we know the location of these objects right now in real time.

In order for us to change out this case, we have to not only remove everything, but we document what condition it's in now, because it might have... the condition may have changed from the time we put it out.

We have to do that photographically and in our database so that we can keep track of any damage that's happening in real time.

Then we have to house these and we have to have all the right archival supplies to then house those, and then we have to document where we're housing them, what box, what number, what shelf.

And that is just taking the exhibition down.

It's a really lengthy process and this is a really large case.

This is filled with hundreds and hundreds of objects that it takes weeks and months to process.

This is our Garvey Educational Room.

We use this room for a lot of activities for our school children, but is also a place that we like to highlight our local artists and artisans.

These are acrylic paintings done by a local self-described novice artist.

If you ask me, I think he has a lot of talent and a lot of potential.

We are the Museum of Art and History, so we do like to have an art element.

These exhibits rotate every two months and we always like to have a gallery opening for our local artists and so that the artists can interact with the community and speak to a little bit of their inspiration, their their processes, their techniques and and that is an educational source in and of itself, as well as providing art for viewing pleasure.

Marion Talley was an opera singer from Nevada, Missouri, who auditioned and sang for the Metropolitan for four years, and she retired after four years and took a trip out to the prairie and decided that she loved it.

As part of our costume collection here at the museum, we have Marion Talley's, one of her operatic costumes here, which, as you can see, is purple velvet, encrusted with beads on the border and the collar in the front.

And it has a handmade lace collar and cuffs.

And this pleating is really interesting.

It has survived the test of time, and any costume buffs out there would enjoy this piece greatly.

And while we're talking about opera singers, Colby has another famous opera singer, Samuel Ramey.

You can see two of his costumes here.

He grew up in Colby and graduated from Colby High School in 1960.

He attended Kansas State on a music scholarship, and he went on to perform all over the world.

And he did come back to do some benefits benefit concerts in the Colby area.

And we are happy and proud to have two of his costumes here on display.

You know when we discussed over the years of adding outbuildings to the Prairie Museum proper, we thought that it was important that we at least portray how the pioneers would have looked at developing their community.

It would have been a school and a church and a residence.

And then in 1992, we moved the the old Foster Barn, which was renamed the Cooper Barn.

The Cooper family donated it to us.

So it's known as the Cooper Barn, and it's one of the eight wonders of Kansas.

And so the first story of the barn is used for educational displays.

They tell the story of the machines that were used in the production of crops.

They tell the story of various farming practices and ranching practices, and the second story is used for activities, for barn dances, for weddings, receptions, all kinds of things like that.

The Foster family raised price herefords and it was very successful operation.

In fact Mr. Foster had lumber companies all over Northwest Kansas.

Foster Lumber Company was well recognized and the Foster Farms were this building originally stood, they had a lot of show stock.

They ran a good operation, and then they joined then with Gary Cooper and they had the Foster-Cooper...

I think they called it the OKC or something like that.

Well, then when they that no longer was in existence there, Gary and his sister, Mary Paulus Cooper, decided to donate this building to the Historical Society for the Prairie Museum of Art History in 1992.

And then it took, I think, it was a 16 mile journey, and I think it took two, if not three days to bring it in and had a lot of a lot of people observing and a lot of people just amazed that they could move a building of this size, a wooden structure into this new site.

I know, I was with the sheriff's office at the time, and we led the led the way when they were on the road trying to keep the public from getting crushed with this huge building passing.

Was it hard to drive five miles a day?

Well, in a Camaro, yeah, it was.

You know, we have a lot of barns in Kansas.

A lot of them were falling in disrepair.

So it's good that we have this site that can preserve a part of our heritage, which is the agricultural heritage.

And so this this building itself just has a lot of meaning in that it is something that won't be replicated unless it's by a huge corporation and it won't be wooden structure like this.

The general mission of the Prairie Museum of Art and History is to preserve the history and the heritage of Thomas County and the surrounding area.

The Prairie Museum of Art and History is off I-70 in Colby, Kansas, but a very short drive.

People can really get a flavor of the development of the area.

And if they want a packaged historical program with exhibits and a little bit for everyone, they should stop and visit.

The values of museums can't really be quantified.

The experiences that we provide have proven to remain in your memory for many years surpassing a visit to a museum.

It also can't be quantified by the amount of history that we have in our repositories that we then pass on to our guests and members of the community.

Museums are for education, they're for entertainment.

They are to present local artists.

I think it's very important because it's unique.

You know, most most museums that you stop at they're either history oriented, they deal usually with local history.

But this is a combination of not only local and regional history, but of arts.

You know, I doubt that you'll find such a pristine collection and of a wide variety from just local county history to regional history to world history in any museum from Kansas City to Denver.

Other than this museum here.

That was the Gary Cooper?

Yes, the Gary Cooper.

He was an attorney here in Colby.

Yeah.

Now it wasn't the Gary Cooper, the actor.

Although Gary could act.