CLAREMORE — Former mayor Tom Pool said creating a Claremore Museum at the site of the old City Library at 121 N. Weenohan is an idea whose time has come. Pool is the Rogers County Historical Society Museum Committee chair.

He and numerous members of the community showed up at City Hall Monday night to ask city councilors to approve a $1 per year lease of the building for the purpose of turning it into a museum.

City councilors gave the nod of approval pending some amendments to the contract and plans to protect and move some memorial wall murals currently in the building.

The most recent incarnation of the building was to house the Claremore Fire Department Administration. Those offices were moved as a budgetary consideration with plans to locate the Department of Public Safety offices, currently housed at the Market, there in order to save that rent. The building needs about $20,000 worth of repairs. When it looked like the Rogers County Industrial Development Authority was going to pitch in to help fund DPS rent at the Market, the city looked at moving the fire department back into the building once it was repaired.

Unfortunately for city coffers, RCIDA had to withdraw that offer due to its own budgetary concerns and the city returned to plans to repair and remodel the building so it could move the fire department back.

However, the Historical Society had another vision.

That vision proposes to preserve Claremore’s cultural heritage. In cooperation with a grant and a program through Northeast Technology Center’s EAST program the exhibits at the new museum will have a high-tech element. Students are working on programing for special iPads to put 3-D illustrations and interactive information about exhibits at the fingertips of visitors.

Under the proposed agreement with the Historical Society the city would retain ownership of the building and would pay insurance on the building but not the contents. The city would also continue to mow the grounds as the proposed museum is located adjacent to city-owned, Gazebo Park.

The Historical Society would be responsible for insurance on the contents, for improvements to the building such as a sprinkler system which would be required under the law when it became a public building, and for the maintenance and daily operations of the museum.

City councilors who have attended demonstrations at NTC regarding the software plans for the museum came on board to the idea very quickly in the public meeting.

The one sticking point concerned wall murals created by 7th and 8th grade art students from Will Rogers Junior High in memory of fallen fire fighters.

That’s one piece of history the Historical Society really doesn’t have room for in the proposed museum. The Historical Society wants the walls the murals are painted on removed in order to restore the building to its original state when it served as a City Library.

Moving the murals could involve “cutting them in half” said Pool.

City councilors said that option is not acceptable. The council passed the motion to grant the lease with stipulations that certain changes be made to the contract and that the murals be preserved and moved safely to another location for storage or display by the fire department.

City staff also recommended the rental agreement

There were questions if not reservations, however, due to an aborted contract between the city and the Historical Society from earlier decades.

In 1995, an agreement virtually identical to the current one was adopted, and the Society rented the building from the city for $1, but the museum never came about.

In less than a year, the Society came back to the city and amended that to include only the small addition to the building that houses the Lynn Riggs collection and serves as the Lynn Riggs Museum. That has been in place since 1996.

The museum is not staffed by volunteers and does not keep the posted hours.

Rogers County Historical Society Vice-President John Cary said the Riggs Museum is a different situation than the new idea being proposed.

“When we took on the Lynn Riggs, we had family members of Lynn Riggs that were managing it,” said Cary. “We probably put close to $5,000 into that building even though it’s not our building.”

The Lynn Riggs family member, Leo Cundiff, who managed the museum, passed away leaving it unstaffed.

“Since that time, we haven’t been able to get anyone to step up,” said Cary. “The Claremore Museum of History is something many people are interested in.”

Judy Eagleton has a large collection of local memorabilia available for the museum as well as a number of contacts with other potential donors.

“Judy’s the heart of this committee,” said Cary.

Cary said history will be brought to life by modern technology.

“What we’re doing right now is we’re partnering with Northeast Career Tech. One of the students wanted to help,” said Cary. “We plan to have significant documents and information online through tablets like I-Pads.”

NTC students are working with software companies to customize the technology.

“We have a plan to preserve and be able to display a lot of the information from Claremore’s history,” said Cary.

The committee doesn’t want to destroy the fire fighter murals, but does want to restore the building to the condition it was in when it was a library.

“That building has a special meaning for a number of those students,” said Cary. “We’re non-profit. What you have to do is come up with enough interest to man it.”

He said there had not been enough interest in the Lynn Riggs Museum to staff it.

“In ‘95 the Historical Society signed an agreement to lease the library. At that time we were looking at trying to expand what we were doing. At the same time we were looking at the Will Rogers Hotel,” said Cary. “We were also trying to preserve the Belvidere. It got to be more than we could handle.”

The agreement was amended in 1996 to just operate the Lynn Riggs portion. Cary said the Historical Society was charged with managing it with the city still paying the bills.

The Claremore Museum is a different situation and Cary thinks it will draw tourism to the city.

“The (current) focus is on heritage tourism,” said Cary. “We’re talking about old parts of Claremore.”

Every high school year book would be on display, not just the old ones.

“There’s a lot of people coming in on Route 66,” said Cary. “They don’t just go to the J.M. Davis and the Will Rogers. We do plan to have a welcome center too. We’ve got bus parking.”

Plans include a paid person to keep the museum open but whether that person would be full or part-time is dependent upon how much money is raised to support the museum.

“We’re not going to start that until we think we can get the building,” said Cary. “Our offer was, give us 90 days to raise $50,000 to see if we can proceed with this. If we can’t, we’ll drop it.”

City councilors said they are willing to give the Historical Society more than 90 days to raise the funds. That’s one of the items they want amended in the contract.

“I expect the funds to come from people primarily who are interested in Claremore history,” said Cary. “This is a project like the Belvidere. This is a project like the hotel.

“The hotel was purchased for a $1 at a tax auction. We were able, through partnerships, to raise over $2-and-a-half million to renovate that... this is the sort of thing the Historical Society has done.”

In that perspective said Cary, “the library doesn’t seem so daunting a task.”