BIG POOL & IMMIGRATION HISTORY TO OPEN FALL MUSEUM PROGRAMS

Finney County Historical Society

The Finney County Historical Museum’s Brown Bag Lunch and Evening at the Museum programs in Garden City are resuming soon for fall with a new series of six free presentations about history.

The Brown Bag Lunch series offers sessions at noon on the second Wednesday of the month, September through November and January through April. The parallel Evening at the Museum series provides presentations at 7 p.m. each third Tuesday of the same months.

Admission is free, with access through the museum’s north entrance. Those who attend are welcome to bring their own lunch or dinner, if they wish, with the museum providing dessert and beverages. The evening programs are sponsored by the Southern Council of the AT&T Pioneers.

The noon programs will begin with a history of Garden City’s municipal swimming pool on Sept. 11, offered by Museum Education Coordinator Johnetta Hebrlee. Interest has swelled in what was once known as the world’s largest free, concrete, municipal swimming pool since an announcement by the City of Garden City that the summer of 2020 will be the facility’s final season in its present configuration.

The lunch segments will continue Oct. 9 with a presentation about collecting Coca-Cola souvenirs and paraphernalia, offered by Linda Miller, an avid collector in Garden City; and a session Nov. 13 entitled “The Secret Life of Bees” by Garden City resident Amy Whitham, whose special interest includes ties to early-day bee keeping and honey production in Finney County.

The first 7 p.m. program includes a presentation Sept. 17 of the recent documentary, “Strangers in Town,” produced by Lawrence film-maker Steve Lerner and partners about Finney County’s history of absorbing immigrants into the population. The 33-minute production debuted statewide last fall in Garden City and has since been viewed online by more than 13,000 people, as well as by live audiences in Hays, Kansas City, Manhattan and Overland Park. It has also been screened at film festivals in Las Cruces, NM and Tacoma, WA.

Additional 7 p.m. museum programs include the story of Garden City’s historic Warren Hotel, an early 1930s landmark, which will be given Oct. 15 by the education coordinator; and an outline of recent archeological discoveries in Southwest Kansas by Chad Myers on Nov. 19.

Myers is an archeological consultant from Kalvesta who has drawn crowds for two previous presentations about arrowheads and other stone points unearthed in and around Finney County.

The schedule of evening and noon-hour programs for January through April will be announced in December.