Gold Fever! Exhibit opening

Rotary volunteers and Interact members

Saturday the 27th was a big day for the IVDM. In the morning, El Centro's Rotary Club and the Southwest High Interact Club spent Rotary's National Volunteer Day curating at the museum.  17 people curated 348 artifacts in 3 hours and found some cool stuff, like a fragment from a porcelain dish and an old Swiss Army knife.

One of the 348 artifacts curated by El Centro Rotary and SW Interact Club. 

Later in the afternoon, visitors from Imperial County, Jacumba and as far as San Deigo helped us celebrate the grand opening of our first traveling exhibit. "Gold Fever! Untold Stories of California's Gold Rush". It's amazing to think that last January we just finished the curation lab and today we have a full exhibit up on the walls.

A major crowd pleaser!

Exploring our new topographical map

Nearly 100 people visited throughout the afternoon to eat tacos at the cart sponsored by the El Centro Rotary Club, listen to traditional cowboy music performed by El Centro's own Jugless Jug Band, and view the exhibit. Adults and children alike enjoyed testing their knowledge of the area and identifying good hiking areas our new
topographical map of San Diego and Imperial Counties.

Families enjoyed our miner's cabin and trying to identify different objects in the miner's trunk a miner would have brought with him for work and for fun. El Centro's own Jugless Jug Band played timeless favorites like "Buffalo Girls" and "Little Brown Jug" and quizzed the museum staff on the historical meaning of each verse to "She'll be Coming 'Round the Mountain".  We didn't know nearly as much as we expected we would. (I guessed right about the 'she' in the song being the mail coach, but who knew the white horses were because the mail coach used Percherons almost exclusively, and they are grey/white?)

Jugless Jug Band

This was really exciting for me as my first major exhibit opening and getting to see all our hard work pay off.  I learned more about the Gold Rush than I ever imagined, and even more about how to put together a fantastic exhibit with only a small starting point.  I'm going to try and write an article about it for publication and a conference- we'll see how it goes!