“About 1% of our collection is on display,” BCHS museum curator Ryan Harren. “The museum has about 4,000 square feet of display space.

It is a problem every museum faces. Only a certain amount of artifacts can be on display at a single time. The rest of the museum’s collection is kept in storage.

Harren said when not on display, most artifacts in the collection are located in two storage locations. One is located in the museum basement, the other is in an annex building.

Though most of the collection is in storage, Harren said most of the artifact been on display in the museum at some point. Items are frequently being swapped in and out as exhibits changed. Visitors who remember seeing an item on display can be assured it is not gone.

An unknown item is part of the Brown County Historical Society (BCHS) Museum collection.

“We don’t just make things disappear,” Harren said. Even items that are not currently on display in the museum can be viewed by appointment.

In the main storage room below the museum basement is a series of rollout rack shelves where dozens of paintings and other artwork hang. The setup allows Harren and other staff to quickly find certain artwork and save space.

Harren said most of the framed paintings and photographs in storage were on display in the museum before being cycled out. One painting of Hermann the German was only put into storage within the last few years.

There is always a chance some of the artwork will return to the main display room. Harren said with every new exhibit he tries to think of ways to use the different items in the collection. For some artifacts, it is harder to find a time or place to display them.

In one corner of storage under a cloth is the first x-ray machine in Brown County. The old-fashioned x-ray machine was originally owned by a doctor in Springfield and ended up in the historical society’s collection.

Harren points to a vault door in the museum’s storage space. The vault is a left over from the museum’s past life as a post office.

Other items are too large to display fully in the museum. Spread across several shelves in the museum’s storage room is a disassembled church organ built by the Vogelpohl and Spaeth company. The organ was donated to the historical society after the company closed. Harren said the museum has never attempted to assemble the organ for display.

“It is large,” he said. “I would like to assemble it someday, but it is a full church organ and there are few places we could display it in the museum.”

In annex storage, several large painted panels were used as backdrops in historical pageant performances in 1962 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the U.S./Dakota War. The panels are important artifacts, but they were designed to hang on a stage, not in a museum.

Technically, the largest piece in the museum’s collection is the building.

“The building itself is an artifact,” Harren said. “We do our best to maintain as we would any other artifact.”

A 1930's era pinball machine is also part of the collection

The museum once served as New Ulm’s post office, and there is evidence of its postal history for those who know where to look. There are actually two heavy-duty vaults in the building. The largest is in the basement storage place. The former postal logo remains on the door.

Another factor that can keep an artifact in storage is missing information. There are some artifacts that were donated to museums without proper citation. Harren said there are some plaques and paintings in the collection that are missing context. The museum is uncertain when the artifact was created or what its original significance was.

“That’s why we are working to archive everything,” Harren said. “We want to catch the stuff that fell through the cracks.”

The museum was recently received a grant through the Minnesota Legacy Amendment to help inventory a portion of the collection. With the grant the BCHS is able to hire consultants to go through collection boxes and archive different items.

“The main reason for this is to confirm what we have and where it is,” Harren said. Part the inventory process will include photographing items to keep a digital record of items to reduce handling of artifacts.

Harren unveils an x-ray machine covered by a sheet.

There is no typical day for museum curator. One day he could be working on setting up a new exhibit and then a new item could be donated. Accepting donations can be a challenge. The museum cannot take every item.

“We do not need any more taxidermy birds,” Harren said. “We are not a natural history museum.”

There are better places to donate those items. The museum has some fossils in their collection including bison skulls. A five-foot section of mammoth tusk is on permanent display on the museum’s main floor, but these are the exceptions.

Harren said in general the museum tries to avoid duplicates. If they already have a specific model of typewriter, they likely will not accept another.

The museum also has an abundance of military uniforms from the early 20th Century. Harren estimated they have 15 WWI uniforms alone. However, they did not have any uniforms from Desert Storm or the recent conflicts from the 21st Century.

Harren said the biggest gaps in the museum’s collection were the relatively recent history. Clothing donations are common, but the museum has few items from the 1980s, 1990s or 2000s. Most of the museum’s artifacts from the ’80s and ’90s came from local businesses.

“We like to have items from local businesses because they help tell their story, but we don’t have many personal items from these decades,” Harren said.

Electronic technology is another gap in the museum’s collection. The museum does not include any computers or cell phones. Harren is waiting for someone to donate an old smartphone.

Harren said in most cases if someone is willing to donate an item to the museum, he will consider it. Even if they have a surplus of a particular item, they might accept if it has a unique story.

A typewriter owned by a famous writer would be of value. However, an artifact is not valued just because it belongs to an important figure.

“We don’t just take items from the famous families in Brown County,” Harren said. “We want artifacts from everyone.”