Rowan County Veterans Museum undergoes 7-month renovation

MOREHEAD, Ky. ( FOX 56 ) — Bringing history to life—that’s one of the missions of the newly re-imagined Rowan County Veterans Museum.

The seven-month renovation project aims to create an experience the brave men and women from Rowan County who served in the U.S. military would be proud of.

From World War I to the War on Terror, visitors will travel back in time to learn firsthand accounts of what it was like to serve in those wars.

It was a mission the staff at the museum, like historian David Clinger, left no stone unturned to accomplish.

“This museum belongs to the community,” Clinger proclaimed. “This museum belongs to the people of Rowan County, the veterans, and also Kentuckians in general.”

Over those seven months the museum was being re-imagined, Clinger got the chance to see all the rich history the community of Rowan County has to offer when it comes to the armed forces. It was a project he took immense pride in being a part of.

“When I got involved a year ago, I just fell in love with the museum,” Clinger described. “When I saw all the different things in here, I said, ‘This is something that I want to be a part of.’ I’ve always been concerned about veterans’ issues. My stepfather and my grandfather were both veterans of the U.S. Army. Even though that I didn’t serve, I thought, you know, this is a way that I can kind of give back and help.”

Some items in the museum are more than 100 years old.

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Clinger calls it a million-dollar collection, making the job of preserving that history all the more important.

“You look at the World War II generation now; growing up, you didn’t really think about, well, hey, my grandfather, grandparents are going to be around forever,” Clinger explained. “Now you look at how many World War II veterans we actually still have with us. They’re in their early one-hundreds, late nineties, very late nineties. And now our Vietnam generation, they’re in their seventies or eighties and, you know, that’s things you want to look at and you want to be very mindful of is history going forward and moving forward, making sure we collect their stories, your information.”

It is also very important to teach the next generation to understand and appreciate the history they see throughout the museum.

“We have children that might come in eight or nine years old, and they’ll say, ‘Hey, grandpa, what did you do during the war? Did you know my grandfather was a veteran?’ But it starts those conversations, and it starts that interest in that,” detailed Clinger. “It sparks that seed of interest that really gets people going and really gets them involved in learning about their family history, learning about their ties, their communities, their neighbor, or their uncle. It really starts kind of that journey.”

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The museum has permanent exhibits going through each of the major American wars as well as a rotating exhibit that currently features the U.S. Navy’s ties to Morehead and Rowan County and how Navy electricians were trained on the campus of Morehead State University.

To learn more, you can find information here .

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