I think our children would say that Chaparral Park and the Lea County Museum are their absolute favorite places to be in Lovington, NM. They love the fact that at the museum they can go into the out buildings and really experience them. They will pretend that they are an old time post master or the proprietor of the mercantile. Sometimes, we love to just go sit at an antique school desk in the one room schoolhouse. I especially enjoy sitting in the parlor of the old Love house. Somehow, I can feel a little bit of how the old pioneers must have felt.
Jim Harris, the director of the museum,is an amazing man. He is a professor, writer and is always willing to sit and talk about the history of our state and county. He is at the museum from dawn to dusk or beyond most days it seems. He wrote the following to share with you all about the Lea County Museum.
Almost daily I hear some visitor to the museum say something like, “If these rooms could talk, what stories we would hear.”
It’s a natural response to the Lea County Museum, a place of several structures--a hotel, a 1909 home, a one-room school house, a mercantile from the early 1900s, 1 1950s home, a store that stood on the edge of the caprock in the early 1900s--all of them filled with historical artifacts big and small.
In one display case, a belt designed by a Navajo jeweler whose ancestors made the Long Walk in the 1860s.
In a replica of a blacksmith shop, a harness from a team of horses pulling a wagon out West so that New Mexico settlers could start a new life.
In one permanent exhibit on the second floor of the old Commercial Hotel built in 1918, dresses owned by a native Lea County woman who wore the elaborate gowns to parties thrown by President Kennedy just after his inauguration in 1961.
The year 1961 might not seem like history to some, but the dresses worn by Dessie Sawyer and all the other objects on display at the museum speak to visitors of times past. They tell of stories of who we are and from where we came.
Most visitors to the Lea County Musuem don’t need guides to hear the narratives of the history on display. The articles donated by families and friends in Southeast New Mexico are emblematic and suggestive enough to fill many volumes of story books and many chapters of history texts.
The museum does provide, however, contexts within which to understand the artifacts. Each month at the museum there are lectures, performances, presentations, exhibits, and entertainment designed to provoke the visitor to think about our history.
The Lea County Museum is an educational institution, and the volunteers and board members who keep the old places alive want everyone to feel at home and hear the stories from our region’s past.
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Mar. 27, 2007 - Forms