Federal Employer Number: 39-1034964

1/2 Our last meeting was Thursday, November 17th, 2004 at which time elections were held for the coming year. This coming year’s officers are

President: William J. Woolley

611 Hillside Terrace

Ripon, WI 54971

(920) 748-2260

woolleyw@charter.net

Vice President Todd Berens

W12281 Olden Road

Ripon, WI 54971

(920) 748-6379

Secretary Shirley Williams

718 Sunrise Drive

Ripon, WI 54971

(920) 748-9615

Treasurer Harry Heileman

624 Sunset Circle

Ripon, WI 54971

(920) 748-6699

3. Our Board members for next year are listed below. All live in Ripon

Michelle Benson, 26 Jefferson, #4 Coordinator, Special Projects

Mary Brandt, 411 Union St. Curator of Collections: Artifacts

Bonnie Brooks, 14 Jefferson Program Chair

Bev Christ 324 Oak St. Newsletter Editor

Frank Farvour, 719 Ransom Coordinator of Archeological Collections

George Miller, 778 Hillside Terrace Curator of Collections: #J Library and Archives

Ralph Quinney, N7925 Doty Drive Buildings Maintenance Supervisor

Barbara Scott, 121 Thorne Membership Secretary

Jean Woolley, 611HillsideTerrace,Coordinator of K-12 Educational Programming

4./5. Our Newsletter Editor is Bev Christ

6. Paid Staff: None

7. We have been quite active this year. Please see the attached list of activities.

8. Membership as of December 31, 2004 was 177

9. Budget: Income (Including gifts to our capital campaign) $51,239.59

Expenditures $15,994.85

10 We receive no public funding.

11. Please change the address for George Miller to 778 Hillside Terrace, #J

Please add Mary Brandt, at her address noted in #3 above.

12. Yes

13. Web page address: http://my.core.com/~riponhistsoc/

14. We own two houses and a barn.

15. Total estimated attendance: 515. This number is hard to determine. We have a guest book, but are not rigorous in getting people to sign. We do count crowds at programs and open houses, so that this number reflects the number who signed the guest book plus attendance at Society events. It does not include members and volunteers who came in to work during the day almost every day of the work week, the dozen+ college students who came in for class twice a week in the spring, students who came in to work on research projects, and the two student interns who came in daily for eight weeks during the summer.

16. Report submitted by

William J. Woolley, President

January 30, 2005

Programs: We held six public programs this year on topics that included "Celebrating the Anniversaries of the Birth of the Republican Party in Ripon" (carried out as part of the local celebration of the 150^th anniversary of the founding of the Party), Myths and Misconceptions Regarding the Lewis and Clark Expedition," "Historic Architecture in Ripon’s Barns", "Restoration of Ripon’s ‘Octagon House’", "The History of Presidential Elections in America", and "Reminiscences of the History of the Ripon Historical Society". In addition we held an open house in August in which we featured a walking tour of the new Southwest Historic Residential District, and one in December as part of the city’s annual "Dickens of a Christmas" festival.

Support Activities: In keeping with our policies of offering the use of our facilities to organizations the local chapter of AAUW met at Pickard House.

The feedback from the fall 2003-2004 second grade visit was very positive, and the teachers have indicated that they would like to repeat the visit in the 2004-2005 year, probably in the spring.

Museum: This has been a year of progress in adding volunteers to meet the needs of our Museum services which include the selection, accessioning, marking, storing, maintaining, and exhibiting of our artifact collection and historic gardens. We have added three volunteers wit the interest, willingness to learn, and needed technical stills amongst them and the dedication to give morning hours most week days to carry out this work.

Our policy is to maintain a Museum dedicated to preserving the heritage of the City and Town of Ripon. Our policy to preserve includes our mission, which is to be a primarily educational society. Of special note is the role these volunteers play in our exhibits. The are helping to keep the furnishings of our Pickard House Entrance Room, Children’s Exhibit Room and Meeting Room all of which are appropriate for the occasion or special events or to rotate the exposure of our artifacts and archival materials in storage. At present our barn is in the process of change to be implemented in 2005.

We mounted several special museum exhibits this year, including an exhibit related to the celebration of the anniversaries of founding of the Republican Party in Ripon which we carried out as part of the local celebration of the 150^th anniversary. In the fall we mounted an exhibit featuring new accessions to the collections. At our Christmas Open House we mounted an number of exhibits on family theme of "The Night Before Christmas" focused on the family celebration of Christmas in Ripon in the past.

With the help of our summer interns, Jessica Owens and Zachary Chitwood, we reviewed our entire military history collection with an emphasis of separating out artifacts that had no relation to the history of Ripon. These materials were offered to the Veterans Museum in Oshkosh where they were readily accepted.

Gardens: We hire help for lawn mowing and snow removal but rely on volunteers (our "Adopt a Plot Program") to develop and maintain our landscaping, which emphasizes historic appropriateness since our buildings are historic. We see our plantings as an extension of our educational mission. To attract volunteers we advertise for person interested in adopting a garden or area of our grounds, which are, themselves, divided into a number of distinct plots. They are asked to plan and maintain what they adopt. To date we have seven volunteers but need more to cover all our gardens and to enhance their educational value.

Archive, Reference, and Library: In the archives, our Associate Archivist, Nedra Martz, completed the review of the Pedrick Papers, the backbone of our archival collections, while our Archivist, George Miller, working with student interns, completed the reorganization and shelving of the Edgar Zobel collections. We also received the following additions to our archival holdings: Additional papers for the Hargrave-Harris Collection, Intern Zack Chitwood’s oral history of Ripon during World War II, Frank Farvour’s Memoirs As a separate project we have been placing our obituary index into a data base that we plan to make accessible over the internet. Outside of those activities, we made contact with the Area Research Center at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Library, which contains a lot of materials related to the history of Ripon and have compiled a record of that material. In addition, we participated in the Ripon Historic Commission’s nomination of Ripon’s Southwest Residential district for a place on the National Register of Historic Places, and later prepared a pamphlet for a walking tour of the district. Finally, as in the past, the archives were used by Russell Blake’s course in local history allowing students to carry out original research projects using primary sources.

The major project in the library has been a cataloguing of the collection on a data base. In reference, the opening of our website has led to a small increase in the number calls we get for genealogical research. As before, our extensive holdings in building and residence histories has led to a number of reference calls from homeowners and prospective homeowners.