By ANDREA POTEET
Sunday Times Newspapers
WYANDOTTE – A grant recently received by the Wyandotte Museums will help bring the city’s history to life.
A $15,000 grant the Museums Department received from the Michigan Humanities Council will go toward improvements on the decades-old City History Exhibit, in the basement of the Ford-MacNichol home.
The planned improvements include two levels. A lower level will focus on the city’s prehistory, geography and early industries and the second level, to be housed on the third floor of the museum will cover the social history of the city’s post-settlement period.
The grant will cover improvements to the basement level, which will include nods to the city’s Native American roots as home to the Wyandot tribe in the 1700s.
In a letter to the council, Museums Director Jody Egan said the position of the addition, on the basement floor, is fitting.
“The early history of Wyandotte, literally at the very foundation of our building, reinforces the rest of the museum tour by setting the stage for this convergence of societies,” she said in the letter.
The improvements, the first major ones to the exhibit since its inception in the 1970s, will be subsidized with $29,000 from the museum’s budget.
The exhibit is to open in spring 2013.