Two loyal volunteers at the Granville Historical Society were honored with one of the organization’s top honors.
Lynn Overholser and Madison Murray were presented the Harold “Buck” Sargent Volunteer Award on Nov. 30 at the Society’s annual meeting.
The award is given “for demonstrating a loyalty and tenacity in continued and unheralded hard work for the Society over a number of years—as demonstrated by Buck himself,” said Cynthia Cort, Emeritus member of the Society’s Board of Managers.
Sargent was a member of the Board of Managers for a number of years, serving among other ways as buildings and grounds chair.
L-R: Cynthia Cort, Madison Murray, Chuck Peterson, Lyn Overholser
Overholser, a Granville native, was credited for a number of contributions over the past several years, said Chuck Peterson, who nominated her for the award.
“This past year, Lynn took over the challenging position of Volunteer Coordinator, mainly ensuring that Museum Hosts were scheduled for our open hours Saturdays and Sundays from May through October,” Peterson said. “We had a team of 15 hosts that she relied upon. She has also successfully filled a schedule of hosts for the museum being open from 1 to 7 p.m. on the day of the Granville Christmas Walk.”
In 2021 Overholser has been at work designing three “story boards” that will be situated outside the museum, providing information about three aspects of Granville history: its pre-history, the arrival of Welsh settlers prior to the founding of the village, and early downtown Granville. This project is funded by a grant from the Granville Community Foundation and should be installed next spring, he said.
Peterson said Overholser’s eye for art and design has been a tremendous asset to the Society, particularly for museum decorations for the Christmas Candlelight Walking Tour and for Beggars Night for Halloween, and for museum exhibits in general.
“For the 2017 Christmas Walk, the theme was local vintage Christmas cards enlarged and hung from the ceilings throughout the museum,” Peterson said. “In 2018 she and her helpers found Christmas advertisements from The Granville Times and The Granville Sentinel, enlarging and displaying them as well. In 2019, photos of Granville residents, both identified and unknown, were enlarged and displayed throughout the museum accompanied by personal letters and biographies of those pictured. In addition to these themes, there were numerous holiday decorations throughout.”
For Halloween décor, there was a lot of humor as well as fun-filled fright employed, Peterson said, with the use of skeletons, including one on the carriage in the museum’s front room, and another using the wringer washing machine in “Oese’s Kitchen”. In front of the museum, trick-or-treaters were welcomed with colorful Halloween paraphernalia including witches’ hats hanging from tree branches.
“Lynn’s ideas have also made our museum exhibits more appealing to the eye,” Peterson said. “It was her idea to add a visual aid to mimic a canvas top for the Conestoga Wagon in the front room. She has worked on several manikins to add depth to many exhibits including the Agricultural Exhibit and a one-time ‘Ms. Granville’ exhibit featuring six famous Granville women, each dressed for their period in history, with biographical information and a chance for visitors to vote on who impressed them the most.”
Lynn also deserves credit for the antique chairs display here in the Robinson Research Center.
“This award is a bit overdue for Lynn Overholser,” Peterson summarized.
Madison, a Denison University graduate, volunteered time in the Society’s Collections area while a student. During this time she has learned about receiving, documenting, cataloging, labeling and storing items for the collection as well as using the PastPerfect database used in the Collections department to keep track of artifacts.
“She was interested in learning as much as she could about museum techniques,” said Cynthia Cort, also the manager of the Society’s artifacts collection, who nominated Murray for the award. “That was now over five years ago. During those years, we have taught her as much as we can.”
As a result, Madison has cataloged hundreds of Native American points and is currently cataloging the many pieces of The Granville Times press, which the Society inherited from The Works museum in Newark.
“To catalogue each of these items she researches the subject and describes and measures carefully each different object,” Cort said. “She has also worked in the Denison Library. Since her graduation from Denison, she is about to finish a master’s degree in Libraries and Information Science at Kent State University which involves both library and museum management classes.”
While volunteering, she completed the American Society for State and Local History Introduction to Archives online class and she will soon be on the market for a job using the skills she has learned from and donated to the Society, Cort said.
“We have been very appreciative of and impressed by her dedication, reliability, eagerness to learn and give back, and command of the practices involved in managing a collection,” Cort said. “Thank you Maddie!”
In other annual meeting business, the following slate of officers and board members was approved for 2022: Heidi Drake, president; Chuck Peterson, vice president; Amy Welsh, secretary and Kim Manley, treasurer; and board members (3-year terms) Evelyn Frolking, Greg Dixon and Eric Yassinoff.
