You could say that the new director of the little-known Hennepin History Museum had quite a first year by the numbers.
Attendance? Up 85 percent at events ranging from a Somali weaving festival to fireside history chats to regular museum visits. Membership? That rose 16 percent as more people found their way to the museum in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, thanks in part to outreach at farmers markets and street festivals.
Admittedly, Cedar Imboden Phillips, who completed her first year as the museum's director in November, was working from a low base at what has historically been a quiet venue that attracted few.
Even with the membership gain, the museum still has fewer than 400 members. Attendance was about 3,000.
Yet there's more of a sense of life at the museum. There's a show on now about the area's role in figure skating, from the Ice Follies to the first triple axel landed in competition by an American woman. A show that will open in March, done with the Cycling Museum of Minnesota, will focus on the boom in cycling in the late 19th century.
Some new events have mixed fun with history. Last year, a brewery history tour on a vintage Twin Cities Lines bus also featured stops at local taprooms. An upcoming exhibit will feature people and their pets.
The museum even kicked up a little dust when it protested what it regarded as censorship when Facebook shut down the museum's page for a day, without explanation or apology, after the outfit publicized an upcoming talk by the author of a book about the Ku Klux Klan in Minnesota.
But that may have boosted attendance. "The event itself went great. We had a full room," Phillips said.
