Could new city hall spell the end of a 40-year-old Tri-City museum?
Leaders at the East Benton County Historical Society are sounding an alarm over the future of their home at the Museum at Keewaydin.
Concerns stem from a May meeting where Kennewick city staff and council members got a sneak peek at three concepts to either renovate or replace the 60-year-old city hall at 210 W. Sixth Ave.
One of those options called for demolishing the modest 43-year-old museum and placing it in a 500-square-foot exhibit space inside the new city hall.
But museum administrator Misty Ayers said that’s not enough space.
“It would be a shame to try to fit this 5,000 square feet into 500 square feet, and it would be a shame to put us in a building that is not suitable for a museum,” she told the Tri-City Herald.
The concern comes as Kennewick engages in broader discussions about what its future civic campus south of downtown should look like. Architects West, the firm designing the new city hall, will return to a June 23 meeting as the city council continues to explore design concepts and plans to come to a direction before the end of the summer.
In a post to Facebook this week, Ayers urged residents to write the city council, submit letters to the editor of the Herald and sign a petition to “stop the demolition of the Museum at Keewaydin.”
That petition on Change.org already had 465 signatures by Monday.
“We are the keepers of the people’s things,” Ayers wrote in a blog post this week. “With your help, we will continue to keep them safe for future generations. Losing our building wouldn’t just mean a loss in that investment. It would be a loss for the community that helped create it over 40 years ago.”
‘A marvelous experience’
The museum at 205W. Keewaydin Drive is 9,000 square feet total and a “repository for the stories of our pioneers, railroad workers and farmers.”
It includes spinning wheels brought over on the Oregon Trail, Columbia River petroglyphs, a large piece the old green bridge, old newspaper presses, railroad paraphernalia, a large collection of old Native American arrowheads and spear points, and an extensive library of newspaper clippings and documents that date back to the early 20th century.
The museum includes displays on the Hanford nuclear site, early regional photography and the discovery of Kennewick Man, one of the oldest and most complete ancient skeletons in North America.
One of its most distinctive traits is the petrified wood flooring near the entrance. It was created by Gordon Maxey, a Tri-City resident who owned Maxey’s Mobile Home Park off Clearwater Avenue. He collected the stones and sliced them into flooring for his own home.
“When he passed away, eventually another couple owned it, and they wanted it to stay local, even though they were offered $1 million for the flooring, so they donated it to the historical society,” Ayers said.
Gale Metcalf, volunteer and board secretary of the East Benton County Historical Society Board of Directors, said at the May 19 city council meeting that the museum provides a space of “enlightenment” and “entertainment,” stimulating the curiosities of children and seniors alike.
“It’s a marvelous experience,” he said of providing tours to elementary school students.
City Manager Erin Erdman at that same meeting re-emphasized that these concepts are not final and that the size proposal of a new museum served as a “placeholder.”
The city is doing more research on the museum’s programmatic and spacial needs.
50-year museum lease
The historical society leases the building from the city of Kennewick. The 50-year lease expires in 2031, and there is a right of renewal for another 50 available.
When it opened Oct. 16, 1982, it operated with a mission to tell the story of the Tri-City pioneers who established settlements in the late 19th century.
Ayers, who’s led the historical society for three years now, said the city’s best option would be to build its new city hall at the corner of 6th Avenue and Auburn Street. It would be the least disruptive to city staff, the museum and other facilities on the west end of the civic campus.
She also shirked at the suggestion at a recent council meeting that the museum be moved to the old fire station building at 600 S. Auburn.
“You can’t just put a museum in any old building,” she said. “You don’t want sunlight touching artifacts — or a limited amount, at least. Ideally, you would have climate control and humidity control. Just shoving us in another building that already exists is not a good thing to do.”
The historical society has put a lot of love into the Museum at Keewaydin, despite its slim $60,000 annual operating budget. In 2022, it received a $20,000 paint job to its exterior, and it received $36,000 in new flooring work this year.
The museum has been supported in recent years by revenue from the property sale of Wayne Smith’s farm in the Horse Heaven Hills area, and Ayers regularly applies for grants.
Just as it was a community effort to fundraise the $180,000 needed to originally construct the museum’s building, so to is it to keep the doors open.
Residents can continue to support the Museum at Keewaydin by purchasing admission tickets, becoming a historical society member or booking an escape room event.
