Gilroy Museum Volunteers
Memories Are
Made of This
Written By Larry J. Mickartz
T
he stately William H. Meeks
building on the corner of 5th and
Church started out as the “Gilroy
Free Library.” The Carnegie Library
Building was built with a $10,000 grant
from the Andrew Carnegie. The land,
which was home to a tennis court, was
donated by Caroline A. Howett. Over
the years it has morphed into a classic
small museum with exhibits from the
early days of Gilroy as a native American
settlement to more recent days of
historical signifi cance.
From 1963 to 2009 the Museum was
managed by the City of Gilroy Parks and
Recreation Department. With the financial
crash in 2009 the City stopped staffing
the Museum and it became a volunteer-
run institution. The Gilroy Museum
Management Committee has an affiliation
with the City of Gilroy and the Gilroy
Historical Society. The City provides
building maintenance, landscaping and a
modest budget to help with preservation
of the collections. The Gilroy Historical
Society provides additional support,
funding, and manages the museum grants
and endowments with assistance from the
Gilroy Foundation.
The Museum has four areas of focus:
to gather new artifacts, to maintain the
existing collections, to provide tours, and
to function as a research facility with an
emphasis on Gilroy and its families.
These lofty areas of focus are managed
by a dedicated group of thirty-one
volunteers who staff the museum and
work on the collections in the basement
holding/processing area. In the actual
museum upstairs, collections are rotated.
Within their limited budget, the Museum
follows the Standards and Best Practices
of the American Alliance of Museums. In
other words, this little museum is playing
by big guy rules! Tom Howard is the
Museum Coordinator.
In addition to the various exhibits
the Museum has a healthy collection of
photographs and information on people,
places and events from Gilroy’s past. The
Museum has a set of Gilroy Dispatch news-
papers from 1868 to 2008. Hard copies
are available from 1939 to 2008. The
older copies are available on a microfiche
viewer because the original hard copies,
which are fragile, are kept in the basement
under environmentally-controlled
museum standards.
The Museum is open Tuesdays and
Thursdays from 10 am to 4 pm and on
the first Saturday of the month from 10
am to 2 pm. To volunteer or to get more
information about the Gilroy Museum,
call 408.846.0446 or email:
[email protected].
Photographed above, recently
the Gilroy Museum Management
Committee and the Gilroy Historical
Society honored three nonagenarian
museum volunteers, Muriel Brem
(90), Lil Barton (91), and Horace
Fabing (91).
Betty Jean Kelley, volunteer since
2009, and Nancy Alford, volunteer
since 2014, catalogue a silk and
lace folding parasol from around
1858.
“I enjoy telling the history of Gilroy…
helping people fi nd parents and
grandparents.”
Betty Jean Kelley
The Museum recently acquired a microphone for a
40’s telephone operator, which was Betty Jean’s first
job right out of high school in 1947.
GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016
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