The Longmont Museum begins 2022 by closing the doors to the Longmont 150 exhibit

Marking the beginning of 2022, the Longmont Museum will close its doors to the Longmont 150 exhibit this Sunday — an exhibit dedicated to 2021, the 150th anniversary of Longmont. 

According to Erik Mason, the curator of history at the Longmont Museum and the primary curator of the Longmont 150 exhibit, the exhibit explored Longmont’s history semantically with five overarching themes present in the exhibit — equity and civil rights, technology and innovation, beer and water, natural disasters and transportation. 

“Within those categories, we had many objects and photographs and descriptive texts talking about how each of those themes has been expressed throughout Longmont’s history,” Mason said. 

In the process of curating the exhibit, Mason and the museum’s team thought of the basic concept first, Mason explained, then began looking for objects and photographs to fit in each of the five categories and develop storylines. Next, Jared Thompson, the museum’s exhibit curator, and his team designed the exhibit and built its interactive components which were key parts of the exhibit, Mason said. 

According to Mason, the majority of the items on display in the Longmont 150 exhibit came from the museum’s collection — an assemblage of historical pieces the museum has been gathering over the past 80 years. 

However, the museum was pressed to reach out to community members for exhibit items that would represent some of the more contemporary issues in Longmont, according to Mason. Several Longmont community members contributed to the exhibit, particularly things that would be part of the equity and civil rights section, Mason said. “Our collection didn’t have as much as we hoped for in (the equity and civil rights) category,” he said. 

Apart from the interactive components, Mason’s favorite part of the Longmont 150 exhibit was the display of objects from the Museum’s collection which had never been exhibited before, Mason said, as well as the stories those objects told. One such item was the American flag which was featured in the entrance of the exhibit. 

“Right when you walked into the exhibit, there was a very, very fragile American flag that was donated to the museum back in 1959,” Mason remarked, “When it was donated, the donor said it was the very first flag ever flown in Longmont back in 1871. It kind of gives me chills when I see that … it’s just like ‘wow, this is an object that’s been in Longmont for over 150 years and has seen so much.’”

Also featured for the first time in the Longmont 150 exhibit was a wooden water main — “a very evocative piece,” Mason said, “when thinking about how we had to hand build basic pieces of infrastructure for many years and how (the pieces of infrastructure) have been preserved.” 

Besides the flag and water main, there are many other items in the exhibit that talked about different elements and times in Longmont history, according to Mason. 

In particular, the beer and water section of the exhibit explored how history has evolved from the earliest years of Longmont, a time when alcohol was strictly forbidden, “to now a town that is a center of craft brewing, as well as its distilleries and cidery,” Mason said. In this section of the exhibit, there was an early anti-saloon selection ticket on display, as well as logo glasses from almost every current brewery, distillery and cidery in Longmont, “just to show how the community has changed over the 150 years,” Mason said. 

Keeping with the theme of evolution, the museum itself learned something valuable in the process of curating the Longmont 150 exhibit, according to Mason.

“I think this exhibit has really spurred us to realize that we need to be collecting a fuller and broader story of Longmont’s history,” he said. “(The Longmont 150 exhibit) really showed where our collection has gaps and a lot of those gaps relate to more controversial issues in the community, as well as collections tied to groups like Latinos, Japanese Americans and LGBTQ folks. One of the things (the museum) is going to do going forward is really be more active in collecting in areas of the community’s history that perhaps haven’t been documented as well in the past.”

Despite these growing pains, the Longmont Museum considered the Longmont 150 exhibit an overall success, according to Mason, with its success measured by positive feedback and engagement from the community, as well as the amount of time people spent visiting the exhibit. 

“The people who came in (to the exhibit) said they really enjoyed the exhibit and they spent a significant amount of time in there,” Mason said. “That’s always one of the ways we measure the success of an exhibit: ‘do people spend time and enjoy and look at the objects or do they just breeze through and walk out.’ We definitely saw longer periods of time people spent in this exhibit — sometimes up to four hours.”

Following the closure of the Longmont 150 exhibit on Sunday, the exhibit items will go back into the museum’s collection where they will be retained for future display in another exhibit. Fortunately for the Longmont Museum, several people who initially loaned items for the Longmont 150 exhibit have converted the loans into donations, “so we will be adding some of those things from the exhibit into the museum’s collection,” Mason said, “and we’re delighted about that as well.”