As regular readers of this blog know I volunteer at the museum to scan the 25,000+/- historic photos. (I’m now a bit over 10,000 photos...

By the 1920s, the local economy had declined due to the collapse of the sawmill industry. With several smaller industries attempting to...

As a rule of thumb, the “responsibility” of a bell is to signify when something has begun or ended. However, much like the ding-dong,...

BY MARK FEDDER Right before last year’s Christmas season I purchased a film to digital convertor in an attempt to upgrade all of the...

Many years ago I was host of visitors to Manistee County. We were driving around the county and I was helping them with the county’s...

Dating old photos is a skill. Back in May 2020 I wrote an article about using the existiance of highways (when built) and if they were...

When people decide to go into business for themselves, it is often a genial mix of experience, service, and product that sustain their...

The older I get, the more I seem to notice how the summer light changes as the months wear on into fall. As I am typically an early...

No matter what era a building is constructed in, it is doubtless that those (i.e. architects, contractors, etc.) who assembled said...

When going through newspapers for the daily “Looking Back” column published in the Manistee News Advocate, I often come across things...

During a normal year, a right of passage for high schoolers is the opportunity to attend the big year end dance called the Prom (short...

The street names in every community run from the mundane (First Street, Second Street, etc…) to the obvious (Main Street), to the ones...

The Manistee County Historical Museum’s main building is in what used to be the A. H. Lyman Drug Store. This was the largest drug store...

Keeping in mind that the city of Manistee was once a large industrial center due to the production of lumber and salt, a lot of...

One of the challenges of working with old photos is when they are poorly labeled, often without a date. So that leads to finding...

Every now and again, when attempting to organize things down at the museum, we will come across a true relic from another day and age...a...

Several years ago at the museum I discovered a bound book that contains roughly 14 months (late 1938 through 1939) of menus from the...

Hello. I am Kurt H. Schindler, a volunteer at the museum. I am scanning and indexing the museum’s estimated 20,000 old photographs. ...

I’ve mentioned museum volunteer Deb Fortier before in the weekly column that I write for the Manistee News Advocate and how from...

These past few weeks I have been thinking more and more about the signifiers of the Christmas season. However, because of the pandemic...