The Knight Museum and Sandhills Center, one of two-city owned museums and one of the largest museums in the state of Nebraska, provides ancestry resources and historical exhibits pertaining to the local area.
According to Knight Museum and Sandhills Center Director Becci Thomas, the museum averages about 24,000 people a year, which is about 2,000 people per month.
“We try to provide something in the community that is a little different and kind of make us a little more adaptable,” Thomas said.
The museum features exhibits including Geology, Native American Life, Pioneer Life, The Railroad and City Life, the Sandhills and the Ogallala Aquifer.
“Our sub stories to this are called ‘Rogues, Rascals and Visionaries’ because my theory is, and the designers agreed with me, ‘you can’t be a visionary unless you got a little rogue and rascal going there,’” Thomas said. “Because you’ve got to be willing to take a chance and a lot of the people that came here both to live and to start out this area seriously had to be visionaries. I mean some of them came here before the railroad.”
One of the missions of the museum is to collect artifacts that come from or have ties to the local area.
Thomas said artifacts in the museum come from the local region or are similar to what people of the area would have had.
An exhibit that has become a feature of the museum is the Ogallala Aquifer.
“Every time I give a school tour, the first thing I ask them is where does their water come from and at least one hand goes up and tells me, ‘faucet.’ They need to know it comes from somewhere before it gets to the faucet,” Thomas said.
Another feature that has grown is ancestry. The museum is currently working on a cemetery project.
“We have this cemetery project which is huge for us,” Thomas said. “That’s also what I’m working on. We have a page for every person buried not just in Box Butte County, but we do the surrounding what we call the ‘shopping area.’ So we do Angora. We do Belmont and Marsland. We do four or five places in Sheridan County and then we go down Highway 2 all the way to Whitman. Because those are the people who may not have lived here, but their lives revolved around Alliance. They came here to doctor, lawyer, to get married, to die.”
The museum has more than 18,000 people in the cemetery project database, which includes a copy of the person’s obituary and a photo of their headstone, if available.
“There is a big push in this country for what they call ‘heritage tourism.’ That is every bit as important as going some place to see Dobby’s, to see Carhenge.” Thomas said.
According to Thomas, ancestry research has grown as more people are showing an interest in looking into their heritage.
“Our heritage room is really one of our biggest deals. We have people coming from all over the country,” she said.
The Knight Museum and Sandhills Center is open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission to the museum is free.