Senior citizens, toddlers, parents and high school students came out Wednesday to reminisce, even mourn, on the last day the Lake County Discovery Museum would be open at its historic Wauconda site.
They wrote on chalkboards in an old school house setting, admired dinosaur bones and fossils, and sat in the life-sized rowboat where the story of Grass Lake, Native Americans and lotus blossoms was told via video and photos.
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“This is so sad. It’s like when Riverview closed down,” said Louis Kasper, referring to the Chicago amusement park that shut its gates in 1967.
Kasper, a Vernon Hills resident and retired pharmacist, came to pay his respects to the Wauconda site. He realizes the museum is relocating to Libertyville, but he couldn’t help saying he felt like he was coming to a funeral.
“It’s not just the museum,” he said. “It’s the setting.”
Housed for 40 years in retrofitted barns in a pastoral setting among old oak trees at Lakewood, the museum will be relocated in about a year to Libertyville in a more corporate setting.
Officials said the new site, which also houses the Lake County Forest Preserves’ headquarters, has more space and high-quality facilities to protect the museum’s hundreds of thousands of holdings.
Museum volunteer Steve Short, of Fox Lake, said he’s enjoyed greeting people at the front desk in the Waucona museum for the past five or six years.
He said he likely won’t be volunteering at the new site when it opens.
“It’s too long of a drive and I’ll miss the setting here,” he said. “I understand the reasons and I think they are all valid, (but) it will be difficult. I like coming here.”
“There’s been a lot of reminiscing over the past few days,” said Andrew Osborne, superintendent of educational facilities for the forest preserves.
Indeed, Mary and Rob Baker of Mundelein, who held their wedding reception at the museum three years ago, came on the last day to take one more look.
“We got married at a church in Fremont and had our reception here. It was a beautiful setting,” Mary Baker said, standing with her husband in the room where cocktails were served during their reception.
Anna and Dave Skonieczny brought their infant, Adele, and 3-year-old daughter, Scarlet, from Round Lake to visit the Wauconda museum before it closed.
“I’m excited we get to come here on the last day,” said Anna. “It’s too bad it will be closed for a year. I read the building isn’t suited for museum holdings, so I understand. (But) they are neat old buildings.”
One of the main reasons to close the Wauconda facility is that the artifacts and displays are housed in old farm buildings that were retrofitted to create a museum. Barns aren’t meant to house museum collections, Osborne said. The new site will have twice as much space for its Lake County history exhibit alone, plus room for more temporary exhibits. The site will contain a state-of-the-art collapsible compact storage facility to protect the collection.
“We understand there’s a lot of sentimental value here, because it’s so charming,” Osborne said. “We can’t replace that.”
But even if the forest preserves expanded and repaired the barns, challenges controlling pests and climate would remain, he said.
Kasper wanted to know why it will take a year before the new site opens.
“A lot needs to get done,” Osborne said. “We have to move 20,000 historic objects and hundreds of thousands of archival materials. Moving is a very complicated process.”
He added the Wauconda site doesn’t have enough room to remain open while staff goes through all the materials, catalogs them and prepare them for moving.
“Every item here has a story,” Osborne said. “Because we’ll be moving them, we’ll be learning the stories. It’s a great opportunity for us. It would have been lost if we had hired a moving company to do this.”
As stories of the artifacts are uncovered, museum staff will put them on the museum’s Facebook page, he said.
Museum staff is creating a plan to present to the Lake County Forest Preserves board in about a month regarding what the exhibits in Libertyville will look like. Most will be new, which means the rowboat exhibit might be gone. But certain legacy items like the fossil rock, which Kasper loves, “will have its place,” Osborne said.
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The district will spend about $1.6 million to complete the museum project in its new site, Nan Buckardt, director of education said in April, a month after it was announced the Wauconda site would close Aug. 31.
The Lake County Board purchased the general offices for $4.1 million in 2010 and agreed the museum eventually would move there.
Sheryl DeVore is a freelance reporter for the News-Sun.