May 21, 2018
Great news! Hennepin History Museum has received a Legacy grant to catalog our Invention & Innovation collection. As many of our readers know, we are currently working on a large-scale full inventory of our collections. This project is a segmentation of this larger collections inventory project currently underway at the museum.
In 2019, we will be opening an exhibition on the history of inventions and innovation in Hennepin County. The artifacts cataloged in this project will help us prepare for that exhibition. Possible items include everything from a collection of Honeywell regulators to irons, Nordic Ware bundt pans, food packaging, games, cosmetics, and medical devices.
This grant has allowed us to temporarily expand our Assistant Collections Manager position from part-time to full-time. Alyssa is quickly becoming our resident expert on local inventions! She’ll be documenting each artifact (shown here), photographing them, and entering them into a database that will eventually be made available online. She’ll also be conducting additional research and writing blog posts about some of the most significant or fascinating items.
Upon completion of the project, we will have detailed collections records on 350 items, and 35 blog posts to share!
This project has been financed in part with funds provided by the State of Minnesota from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the Minnesota Historical Society. This publication was made possible in part by the people of Minnesota through a grant funded by an appropriation to the Minnesota Historical Society from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Any views, findings, opinions, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the State of Minnesota, the Minnesota Historical Society, or the Minnesota Historic Resources Advisory Committee.
