Springfield History Museum Committee Meeting Talk Time Capsule, Along with Atlas Project Updates’

By Ian Valleau - Reporter

SPRINGFIELD, ORE – Time capsules were a hot topic for the Springfield History Museum during their committee meeting Jan. 21. This meeting was held at Springfield City Hall. Topics included movement on the creation of a time capsule, the digitizing of the museum's photo archive and an update on the Atlas Project.

Discussions took place about the collaborations with the Springfield Chamber of Commerce’s 75th anniversary time capsule. Topics included what to include in the time capsule and where it will be buried. The capsule will include notes submitted by the community about what they want the future to look like. Business owners were also invited to include notes on what they want from their business in the future, along with what they want for the future of Springfield. The capsule will be opened on the chamber’s 100th anniversary.

“It’s not going to be buried, the plan is, at least at this point, for it to stay in the chamber building,” Maddi McGraw, Curator at the Springfield History Museum said. “We’re still in talks, I would like it to be something people can see, make it part of the community.”

Committee members also updated the group on the Atlas Project, a new history book about Springfield. The book mostly contains pictures and maps from all distinct parts of Springfield, including Thurston and Centennial. The book evolves through time from the town's origins and to how it got to how it is today. Updates from the project team included a tip that was received by the project historians that, what is now a pet grooming store, used to be the post office in Thurston in the 1900s.

This tip was debunked by project worker Jenna Fribley and declared it was a building nearby, but not the pet groomer. Disagreements arose as zoom attendee and docent David Schmunk insisted the pet grooming store was the former post office. Schmunk’s family has been in the area for generations, so he stuck by his claims based on family memories.

“We had heard a rumor that the pet grooming place out in Thurston was the original post office. We think we have debunked this.” said Fribley. She showed off pictures of the post office at the time and then showed that they do not match up with current pictures of the pet grooming place. When speaking about the project, Fribley said. “It’s mainly a photograph collection, so we have the museums photographs that we use. We’ve been organizing them to tell stories about the town.”

The committee also spoke about the progress of the museums transition to a new online museum catalog called ‘Catalogit.’ This system is much more modern than their previous system and provides easy access to the museums' photographs, objects and archives on the internet. The transition is led by collection technician Sara Reed. During the meeting, Reed reported that from July-January of 2024-25, 5,478 photos were added to the catalog. This number fluctuates every day as photos are added but also taken down due to lack of information or inaccurate information from the submission.

“There’s typos, there are images that are wrong, images that are missing, so we have been working on trying to get every entry to have a nice digital image and a correct title. That is our current goal,” said Reed.

The Springfield History Museum continues to work to keep the history of Springfield alive. They will continue these projects and then reconvene on Feb. 18 at the Springfield City Hall.