Porter County History Museum to grow

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Updated: March 11, 2012 8:48AM

VALPARAISO — The Porter County Museum of History has gotten bigger and world-class, at least on paper.

The paper making it so is a 25-year lease for the old police station on Indiana Avenue, which the Valparaiso Board of Works and Safety signed on Thursday.

Under the lease, the Porter County Heritage Corporation will pay $1 a year rent, and the lease is twice renewable for another 25 years.

The Heritage Corporation, which runs the current museum in the old sheriff’s house and jail at 153 S Franklin St., has been looking for two years for a site to create a museum of art, science and history, Museum Director Kevin Pazour said.

“It’s about time a great community had a great museum,” Pazour said.

“It’s really the beginning of a cultural campus downtown,” he said after the meeting, including the Memorial Opera House, which is next to the current museum. “For a community that prides itself on history, there’s really no place to show it.”

Other sites were considered, but the old police station and one-time city hall just half block away provides the required space, said Paul Bartholomew, Chairman of the board of Trustees of the Porter County Heritage Corporation and President of the Porter County Museum of History, Science and Arts.

The goal is to open in fall 2014, keeping the current museum as a period museum with rooms that rotate exhibits to show the house in different decades.

Before that, the museum must raise $2 million in a capital campaign and $200,000 a year for upkeep. The capital campaign begins in spring, and volunteers will gut the police building in April.

City Administrator Bill Oeding said at the Board of Works that Valparaiso would help and suggested the downtown façade grant as an option for work on the outside. The grant reimburses money spent on improving a downtown building’s outside, up to $25,000 for $50,000 or more of work.

The current museum is closed because of emergency heating system replacement and should re-open in two weeks.