Millville's city hall and museum are getting a makeover

By Leah Lopshire

April 7, 2008 | MILLVILLE -- Plans for the remodeling of Millville's museum were discussed at Town Council Thursday.

At the moment the museum is kept locked, and only open by request, therefore the amount of visitors is very limited. Councilman Mark Bodily said, "the use of the space is wasted right now." Fellow councilman Brian Jensen added, "I think it would be great to utilize and upgrade the space we have now."

Currently the museum is in the same building as the town hall but with a separate entrance. Bodily's suggestion for the museum is to take the displays and materials in the museum and move them over to the public part of the city hall building, and put them into displays over there, and use the old museum space for better purposes such as offices and larger meeting rooms. What exactly it will be used for will depend on the reconstruction that would take place.

The new displays for the artifacts in the current museum will be made out of wood with glass doors, and they will be placed along the walls on the other side of the building. Having the displays in the new cabinets would be better "so it would not be in the way, but people could have access to it," said Jensen.

Bodily reported that the space for the museum as it is now is wasteful because he has only had to open it up for visitors a handful of times in the past year. He did say, "a lot of the stuff in there is nice stuff that we should keep as a city."

Councilman Jared Taylor brought up a concern asking, "would we have to write that into the budget?" He suggested that they should "have someone come in and draw up some plans," to get a better idea of the cost of such a project.

Mayor Johnson joked that "it means we can't get new chairs."

A final decision of exactly what remodeling will take place has yet to be made.

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