Supporters' generosity celebrated

Apr 06, 2023

Sunday's open house at the Fort Shirley Heritage Museum celebrated the area's long history, the generosity of the museum's supporters and a financial victory for the association that governs the museum and its collection.

The two-hour event drew current and former area residents and first-time visitors to the museum which used the occasion to celebrate paying off a $15,000 loan which funded a repair and mold-remediation project at the museum, located on Croghan Pike (Route 522) in Shirleysburg Borough.

In his welcoming remarks to visitors, Guy Bair, president of the Fort Shirley Heritage Association, touched on the museum's history, including how the association was formed in 1977. The museum, constructed from the ground up expressly for the association's collection, opened in 1982.

Bair said the association discovered in 2017 that the sump pump under the museum had failed. As a result, roughly two feet of feet collected in the crawl space under the structure, and with the damp came mold.

Bair said a company was hired to remove the mold and many other hands chipped in to finish the project, either with financial support or with hands-on contributions. The loan was paid in full at the end of 2022.

"We couldn't do anything without the support of everyone here," Bair said.

"It took a lot of apple dumplings, pies and cakes to pay the loan," Sally Love, one of the association's charter members said, adding most of the skilled labor for the project was donated.

"It always seemed that someone would pop up who had the know-now," Love said.

At the conclusion of his talk, Bair burned the loan papers, which elicited applause from the museum visitors.

Bair reminded visitors that "whether we get $1 or $100, it makes it possible to keep the museum going." He shared that there are several more projects in the works at both the museum and at the old school house on West Street.

Those pending projects include refinishing the museum's floors, unsticking windows at the schoolhouse that are painted shut and repairing or replacing the handicap accessible ramp at the schoolhouse.

A featured attraction at the open house was two of the collection's most recent additions: a stereoscope and a collection of cards for 3D viewing, donated by Bill Booher, and an old metal horn with possible connections to Fort Shirley.

The tapered instrument is about four feet in length. Dale Holden of Orbisonia, who donated the item to the museum, said he has no documentation to certify the provenance but says its been long rumored to have been used at Fort Shirley.

George Croghan's fortified trading post, which was located at the Northern end of the borough's current footprint, was part of the local line of defense against attack during a brief period from 1755 to 1756 in the midst of the French and Indian War (1754-1763).

Holden, who grew up in Shirleysburg, said he felt the storied instrument needed to return to Shirleysburg. He purchased it from the Dale Heller auction in Ferguson Valley, Mifflin Co., in September 2022 and donated it to the Fort Shirley Museum Jan. 7.

According to museum documents, Heller purchased the instrument in 1985 at an estate sale from Ida Boyer where the bill of sale identified it as coming from the old fort. Boyer, who died at age 92 at a retirement village outside Huntingdon County in 1988, was a longtime resident of Shirleysburg.

The museum's collection includes a number of items that were excavated from the site of the fort by a team of Penn State archeology students under the direction of Dr. Jonathan Burns. The dig helped establish a more exact location for the fort and unearthed an array of evidence that speaks to fort life.

In June 2021, the museum unveiled a permanent display of artifacts from the dig, accompanied by a timeline of events and other information pertinent to the history of the fort. The display was created for the museum by Juniata College history and graphic design student Hunter Winter.

Rebecca can be reached at [email protected].

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Updated: June 6, 2023 @ 6:17 am

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