Wednesday, August 25, 2021 – I cried today. As I followed my husband, Ron Anderson and Gene Verbeet to a safe place for the Graham truck, it finally struck me. After all of the work refurbishing last winter we have torn everything apart to hopefully save as much as we could from the French Fire. Even with those efforts, we can’t be sure that it’s all saved. We developed a preliminary plan yesterday and had gone home feeling pretty confident. We no sooner got home than we got the evacuation warning! Fortunately, everybody turned right around, grabbed some friends, and hot-footed it back to the museum! There was no way that we could pull everything from the museum, but Charlie Gregory, Gene Verbeet and I had already gone through the entire museum and prioritized the items that were most important and could easily be moved. In prioritizing, we took three things into consideration:

1.Provenance – Did the item tell an important story about our local history?

2.Rarity – is that item rare or irreplaceable? We have many such items.

3.Value – Not everything was extremely valuable, but the most valuable items were important in consideration.

The next consideration was how could we make those items safer? In talking to our Vice President, John Newman and Assistant Curator Roy Fluhart (both of whom are retired Forest Service fire fighters), we decided that the annex was a much safer place than the museum. It is a newer building, it is stucco, it has no eaves, and the roof is fire resistant. Most of the items were moved in there. The rare items were taken around the lake. I’d like to thank the following people for their hard work in making the move:

Michael & Melody Batelaan,

John Newman & Linda Adams,

Charlie Gregory,

Sherry Nichols,

Jimmy & Angela McGuire,

Bill Best,

Nate Blue,

Gene Verbeet,

Roy Fluhart, and

Ron Anderson.

We worked hard until after 10:00 pm! I’d also like to thank Gene Verbeet for the tasty pizzas! Most of us had not had time to eat dinner beforehand! We realize this was not an ideal plan, but we did our best under the circumstances. There were so many larger items that we couldn’t move and that makes me sad! We can only pray that the fire doesn’t get to Kernville. (You’ll know the outcome of this far before the Saddlebag comes out.)

After this is over, the board will be discussing how we can better plan for future fires. We will write up that plan for future volunteers to follow. We will open the museum when we get it all put back together.

      – Dianna Anderson