Senator Eklund joins the groundbreaking ceremony

Thank you and congratulations to all of our board members, staff, volunteers, and community supporters that allowed us to reach this stage in our development. We are finally ready to begin construction on our elevator!

Yesterday, we welcomed media, community partners, donors, and legislators to witness the beginning of a new stage in our development – the construction of an ADA elevator to bring visitors to the second floor of our museum.

We see an average of 30,000 attendees visit our exhibits and museum, however, just under half of them step foot inside this building. 43% of our programming is offsite and over 20,000 exhibit viewers are looking at our collections on loan to other institutions.

While we want to continue to support our community and state through offsite exhibits and programming, the original goal when the society bought this building was to create a history and education center here within our walls.

Once finished, the elevator will provide access to the second floor of our museum where Lynn and her collections crew are digitizing and cataloging thousands of artifacts every year. Researchers will be able to browse primary sources, teachers will have access to new digital and print lesson plans, we will offer GeoHumanities and digital learning, and indoor classroom space will allow us to increase our educational offerings – which have already seen a rise of 31% in the last year alone.

In order to plan ahead and be ready for the first ride to the second floor, we are in conversations with two higher education facilities to help us provide OTES-graded lesson plans and interactive GeoHumanities exhibits and learning tools. We are talking with local foundations to help us provide online researching ability through our website and mobile-ready education for the entire county.

This is an amazing time for the Lake County Historical Society and I want to thank each of you personally for allowing me to join in the process. So many of you have put enormous amounts of time and hard work into this project behind-the-scenes, so I’m so happy that I’m here to see the project finally take form and break ground. We’re moving forward and I can’t wait to see what comes next!

Elizabeth Connor, Executive Director