After having been closed to the public since March 2020, the Williamson County Historical Society Museum and Library at 105 S. Van Buren St. in Marion will reopen to the public on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2021. Before the pandemic the museum/library was able to be open six days a week but due to a loss of volunteers over the pandemic, the museum will begin by being open four days a week from Wednesday through Saturday, 9:30 A.M. till 3:00 P.M. Masks will only be required for those who are not fully vaccinated and groups will be held temporarily to a maximum of six people.
The staff at the museum have been taking advantage of the downtime by reworking various historical exhibits throughout the museum and spent five months working on one of the most popular rooms in the museum which was a general store on the second floor. In the earlier days of our county, when any kind of store was far and few between, stores that served the public had to cover a wide range of articles related to everyday life to serve the local communities, so they tended to be called general stores. The stores sold almost everything required for daily life in those days, including houseware, groceries, clothing, grooming aids, farm equipment, tools, drugs and livestock supplements. The general store in the museum is derived from two actual stores that operated in the county, the A.A. Mosely grocery store from Marion and the Oliver Lewis general and drug store from Stonefort. Both of the businesses used previously owned equipment like shelving and counters that came out of the mid to late 1800’s. The general store has been setup to closely replicate a turn of the century general store.
The museum once served as the county jail from its building in 1913 through 1971 and also doubled as the residence of the current sheriff and his family and is only one of several buildings in the county on the National Registry of Historic Places. The museum has four floors and over 20 rooms full of historic artifacts related to everyday early life including Native Americans, mining, clothing, housewares, tools pioneer life and much more. The museum’s reference library has been put together over decades and contains thousands of useful references for historical and genealogical studies. Anyone interested in researching local history or their personal family genealogy is encouraged to come in and work with our staff to find out more about their ancestors as many researchers in the past from around the world have already done.