Lawshe Museum upgrades to make Dakota County history accessible to all

The Lawshe Memorial Museum, Dakota County's history museum and home base for its historical society, will reopen this month with new exhibits after undergoing a $1.2 million renovation to make the space more accessible.

Several new exhibits — including an upcoming one aimed specifically at school children — will offer visitors insight into a fresh batch of local history topics.

Dakota County owns the Lawshe building, which was built in 1978 in South St. Paul.

"A lot of things have changed since then," said Matt Carter, executive director of the Dakota County Historical Society. "This is the first major renovation that it's gone through ... It doesn't look anything like it did."

A grand opening is planned for Jan. 21 from 1 to 5 p.m.

Improvements are evident throughout. The museum will feature a new elevator, a revamped gift shop and front desk area and updated restrooms on both floors, with the second-floor facilities redone as ADA-accessible family bathrooms.

Upstairs, there's a larger archives area for staff and a revamped meeting room with a new in-ceiling projector and speakers for presentations on topics like genealogy. The meeting room, which can be rented out, also has an ADA-accessible kitchenette.

The museum will offer hearing assistance packs to meeting room visitors who are hard-of-hearing.

There are new parking spots for those with disabilities, a new parking area for school buses and several energy and safety-related improvements, too, county officials said.

The updates were funded by the county's capital budget, officials said.

Steve Cook, incoming 2023 president of the Dakota County Historical Society Board of Directors, said the improvements were badly needed.

"We want to continue to move forward," Cook said of the museum. "This sort of creates a new baseline or platform so that we can then jump even further."

One idea that's been floated, he said, is adding a second story to the Great Hall, a large exhibit space with high ceilings. It's now home to a colorful Dakota County map painted on the floor.

New things to see, touch

A longtime feature of the museum was its old town exhibit, which showed what a barbershop, general store and doctor's office looked like at various points in history.

But that area had narrow passageways that weren't accessible to everyone, including those in wheelchairs, Carter said, so it has been knocked down.

The space soon will be home to four or five new exhibits, he said, including displays on agricultural history, women's medical history and the county's Black pioneers. There will be a retooled version of a previous exhibit, focused either on WWI or the women's suffrage movement.

Jack Nord, supervisor of the Sibley Historic Site in Mendota, designed the agricultural exhibit. He was getting ready to paint on Friday amid a ladder and paper taped to the walls showing where exhibit panels will go.

"We have more room than we thought," he said. "As far as county museums go, this is pretty large."

In front of him was a rust-colored plow — part of his exhibit now but once used by the Plan family on their Inver Grove Township farm, he said.

The exhibit will focus on how agriculture has changed while emphasizing its ongoing importance to the county, he said. It will share information ranging from the impact of Farm Aid to the diversity of modern-day farmers, such as Hmong American Farmers Association members.

Some of the old town artifacts — a cash register, a stained-glass window — still are on display in the Great Hall.

Reaching out to children

Carter said the museum is planning its first-ever exhibits geared toward children. They will include a prehistoric Dakota County exhibit displaying a giant squid fossil and an area dedicated to Fred Lawshe, the museum's namesake. Kids will get to make their own "wonderboxes", a takeoff on the dioramas Lawshe enjoyed creating.

Exhibits on South St. Paul's stockyards and how electrification changed the county also are planned. "Everything will be hands on, to an extent," Carter said.

Dakota County Commissioner Joe Atkins, who frequently includes historical tidbits in his informational e-mails, said he's always amazed at people's interest in local history.

History should be accessible to all, he said.

"To somebody like me who appreciates history, [Lawshe] is a pretty cool spot to visit — and quite honestly it's a lot better now," Atkins said.