Ninepipes Museum Completes Grant from Foundation for MT History

Ninepipes Museum Completes Grant from Foundation for Montana History

This article originally appeared on Char-Koosta News at www.charkoosta.com.

Ninepipes Museum of Early Montana wraps up a $6,500 grant awarded by the Foundation for Montana History this year. This grant funded new vertical shelving for the museum’s stored art collection, humidifiers to stabilize humidity levels during winter months, an upright freezer to ensure new collections entering the museum are pest-free, and archival supplies to safely store collections.

All of these essential pieces of the grant are part of a much larger project which began in 2019 when the museum was awarded funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete a preservation assessment.

“Each year, Ninepipes Museum applies for grants from various sources to help complete projects identified in the preservation assessment” notes Amy Webster, Curator of Collections. “All of this is possible because of that one grant which led to other grants that support our efforts to keep our collections in line with professional standards of care.”

Jo Cheff, Executive Director of the museum also emphasized, “We want the next generation to be able to learn from the history we are sharing, so we take preservation seriously.”

Ninepipes Museum also hosts interns every year from the Historic Preservation program at Salish Kootenai College, so the grants give them valuable work opportunities and experiences in the museum field. In this way it isn’t just the museum that benefits, but the whole community.

The museum closes for the season on Dec. 10th.

We hope you’ll take this opportunity to see what makes Ninepipes Museum a special treasure in Mission Valley!