MOSES LAKE — Moses Lake hasn’t even racked up a century of history yet, but the Moses Lake Museum & Art Center has found a way to celebrate the two and a half centuries since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. 

“We’re celebrating America 250 here at the museum,” said Museum Curator Ann Schempp, “We started planning this event several years ago.” 

The exhibit, which opens today, is in two parts, called “Faces of 250: Our Community in Portraits and Words.” The “portraits” part features 250 photos by William R. Hilderbrand, a Moses Lake photographer whose collection the museum owns. Hilderbrand was a portrait photographer from the 1950s to the 1970s, Schempp said, and his collection includes more than 43,000 photos. 

“Everybody got their photograph taken by Hilderbrand,” Schempp said. “Either you were a baby at a portrait sitting when you were six months old or getting your passport photo taken or being an airman out at Larson Air Force Base … He took your photograph.” 

The 250 people whose photos were selected for the exhibit are a cross-section of Moses Lake’s past and present, Schempp said. Some names will be familiar to longtime residents, and some won’t. Some don’t even have names; one is simply identified as “Rodeo personnel officer.” The subjects came from all walks of life, of all ages. 

“I wanted to include all the different types of people we've had in Moses Lake,” Schempp said. “I made sure to include Japanese members of our community, Latino members of our community, African American members in our community, to give that full picture of with a sign that says, “Do you see yourself in our community?” 

“In this part of the exhibit, we're going to have a bingo card that you can get from the front and it'll have, you know, things like ‘Look for the nun.’ ‘Can you find the set of twins?’” 

The second part of the exhibit goes from faces to words. Museum Superintendent Dollie Boyd collected 250 quotes from old newspapers, oral histories and other sources, and those are on display along with reproductions of some of the original sources.  

“Whether (they were) there for a day, a week or several months, it was long enough for GIs to pick up the griping jargon peculiar to Moses Lake,” Earl Wingard, who was stationed at Larson Air Force Base, is quoted as saying in 1953. “’If you only talk to the jackrabbits, you’re all right,’ they said. ‘But if you start believing them, this place has got hold of you.’” 

Along with “Faces of 250,” there’s an exhibit from Washington State Historical Society called “Moments that Made Us.” That display takes phrases from the Declaration of Independence – “All men are created equal,” “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – and takes the viewer through a timeline of how those words have been manifested in America’s history. Two panels of each phrase are devoted specifically to Washington state. The displays cover the good and bad of American history: slavery, the civil rights movement, the displacement of Native Americans, the sometimes-violent labor movement of the late 19th century. 

“You could do American revolutionary history and be on the surface of all the stories we've all heard before, like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and all of that,” Schempp said. “But I feel this exhibit goes deeper, and it challenges that rosy picture of how America was formed.” 

Schempp got the idea for the two local exhibits at a conference for the American Association for State and Local History. 

“The woman behind me (in line) was on the National Committee for America 250, and she goes, ‘What are you guys going to do?’” Shempp said. “I said, I don't know. We're in Washington state; we're not on the East Coast. We don't feel a big connection to American revolutionary history.’  

The exhibit will kick off this evening with a free opening reception, Museum Communication Coordinator Natalia Zuyeva wrote in an email to the Columbia Basin Herald. The event will include a live weaving demonstration, an adult craft activity and free food, Zuyeva wrote. 

“We're going to have all-American fare,” Schempp said. “We're going to be cooking hot dogs for everybody, and there'll be apple pie and Coca Cola.” 

The opening will also feature a free talk from Humanities Washington speaker Lawrence Hatter, Zuyeva wrote, on the strange duality of the Revolutionary War. A question-and-answer time will follow. 

“Here (they) are fighting for freedom, but yet slaves weren't free,” Schempp said. “Native Americans were getting their freedom challenged. It’s a very complicated history.”