SANDPOINT — Bonner County Historical Society and Museum is opening their doors today, but their past few months of digital work has only just begun.

The museum gang who brought you an immersive historical experience online in the thick of COVID-19, consisted of Heather Upton, curator and interim executive director; Carlie Johanson, education specialist; and Hannah Combs, museum administrator.

“As soon as everything started moving online … all of a sudden these magical things started happening on the web,” Johanson said. “We were seeing free programming from the late night shows in their living rooms and operas free streaming, museum virtual tours and immediately as a human being and also as an educator I had this feeling that we needed to be doing something to serve our local community.”

Their supplies were limited, mostly relying on 70,000 archived photos from BCHS, and knowledge of writing, research and digital content. During the pandemic the trio began to question how they could bring an interactive museum experience to the front doors, living rooms and backyards of North Idahoans.

Both Combs and Johanson joined BCHS in March and though Upton was a curator for five years, she had just joined as the interim executive director in February. This team hasn’t physically been able to work together yet, revamping their website remotely. The group’s new tab At Home With BCHS was specifically designed to explore visual opportunities on the web and preserve modern day history, largely inspired by the social media #StayHome movement in response to COVID-19.

“We thought not just stay home, but at home,” Johanson said. “What can we do at home with the museum?”

The new additions to the website include the Young Explorer program for children ages 0-10 and At Home Historians for ages 11 and up. These projects were intended as tools to help teachers or parents homeschooling. Projects range from foraging in the garden with toddlers to researching the response to the 1918 Influenza with teens.

There is also a podcast called North Idaho Nuggets produced by local author Jennifer Lamont Leo and driving and walking tours offered by Upton. These walking tours are accessible through phones for families to follow along. ”We just feel this is the beginning of our digital presence in such a short period of time and with really limited access to the museum we were really proud of the content we were able to put out there,” Upton said.

Two popular tabs, COVID-19 Archive Submission Form and Sandpoint Porchraits: A Portrait of Your Family In Isolation, aim to collect oral histories, photos, journals and other online media as means to measure the public’s response and document Bonner County residents at the time of the pandemic.

Over 50 families have participated in Sandpoint Porchraits, where residents can pay $30 for a professional photoshoot by Sandpoint photographer Kiersten Patterson on front of their porches, to document who they were and where they were during the stay home order. Half of the proceeds go to Patterson and half go to the museum. BCHS has raised $750 which will be used as general operating funds.

“I don’t think people necessarily realize that we are not a county entity, we are a 501c3 non profit and we rely heavily on grants and sponsorships,” Upton said. “This is not necessarily the current environment where those are falling off of trees … We want people to understand that being the stewards of local Bonner County history comes at a large cost. We have over a million objects in our collection and it takes a lot of funds to be able to manage that.”

Because the museum’s revenue for entrance fees was cut off during COVID-19, the BCHS team has been working to come up with creative solutions for fundraising. One idea has been remodeling their Adopt An Artifact fundraising option, that was introduced a few years ago where patrons can adopt an artifact for $20 per year. Instead Upton plans to research the actual cost to preserve an object and request that amount of money uniquely tailored to the item.

However, BCHS has not been the only museum gaining online traction around the world and social media has been a tool to keep their momentum going. Johanson said BCHS recently took place in a curator battle on Instagram where over 1,700 people commented on their albino crow artifact, “a great way to showcase and share some of our artifacts and also engage the larger community,” She said.

Combs has also gotten in contact with North Idaho Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane to start forming partnerships and keep museums alive amid the financial hit of COVID-19. With interconnectivity, the team has felt that being able to share similar ideas and build on them with other entities has been empowering. One example of a collective conscious project for museums has been using history to inform how people cope with modern day struggles, essentially building a survival kit. Certain survival methods such as gardening, baking bread and rationing meals for food security like people did in World War II have resurfaced due to COVID-19.

“How to Cook A Wolf is this cookbook that came out during World War II when everyone was on rations and you had very little excess meat, and so it was this cookbook that was pretty much like, well you can get rats if you know how to prepare it. It really talks about how to cook with very little in your house and I have these moments early on when everyone was trying to get a whole lot of flour or yeast or broth,”Johanson said. “I started to get really creative with my cooking and then all of a sudden I started thinking back to our settlers and homesteaders who had to rely on themselves to feed themselves, so then we started foraging, so what can you forage in North Idaho that can help sustain you?

“I know for myself, it’s changing the way that I shop. It’s changing the way I am stocking our pantry and that may be a lifelong thing, I am not sure,” She said.

As the museum prepares for reopening on May 19, the team hopes to grow the digital side and continue adding the human element to their website. They hope to do Zoom research requests, more walking tours and creation of videos.

“The opportunity to build the digital presence now, this will serve us forever and the audience that we have now is so much stronger too. People will remember how they used the website and what they got out of it, even after our doors open so I think it is just a shift that will continue into the future,” Johanson said.

The museum will be open on normal operating hours, Tuesday to Friday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. BCHS asks that you wear a mask and archival gloves will be passed out for patrons to wear throughout exhibits, although touching objects is still prohibited. They expect to admit groups of 10 to 15 people at one time.

For more information to help fundraise BCHS projects, volunteering, memberships or donations visit bonnercountyhistory.org or email info@bonnercountyhistory.org.

Aly De Angelus can be reached by email at adeangelus@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @AlyDailyBee.