Sibley, Iowa — One of the events going on at the Osceola County Fair and Sesquicentennial this week is a museum, mounted on a bus.
Organizers of the State Historical Society of Iowa’s mobile museum say it is packed with 56 artifacts and a video that explores 13,000 years of Iowa history.
Housed in a custom-built Winnebago, the 300-square-foot museum on wheels launched in 2017 and completed its first 99-county tour in 2019, making 175 stops along the way and attracting nearly 65,000 visitors, including 11,400 students. The current exhibition, “Iowa History 101: Iowa’s People & Places,” debuted last year and will continue its new 99-county journey through 2023.
It will visit the Osceola County Fair (9th Street West) in Sibley during the Osceola County Fair to offer free self-guided tours on Thursday, July 21, from 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; on Friday, July 22, from 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; and on Saturday, July 23, from 11 a.m.-5 p.m.
It will also be here in northwest Iowa on Labor Day Weekend, with a visit to Okoboji’s Dee’s Bee & Butterfly Festival on Saturday, September 3, and in Sheldon for Celebration Days on Sunday, September 4.
Guests will see iconic artifacts that reflect the role of Iowans in state, national and international events, including a Meskwaki cradleboard representing the past and continued presence of Native nations in Iowa. They’ll also see women’s suffrage materials from the early 1900s and the pen used by Iowa Governor William Harding to sign Iowa’s resolution in support of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Other artifacts include a menu from a dinner held in Des Moines for Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, as well as photos of a southeast Asian refugee and Sudanese women in central Iowa, and a flight suit that southern Iowa native and accomplished astronaut Peggy Whitson wore during one of multiple expeditions (totaling 665 days) aboard the International Space Station.
More details are available at iowaculture.gov. Iowans can also follow the mobile museum’s statewide journey on Facebook at facebook.com/IowaHistory.
