This is House: “America’s Smallest Community Museum”

RIPLEY, W.Va. (WTAP) –

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The “smallest group museum” is found in Ripley

The Ripley Convention and Visitors Bureau opened to the general public in 2014, and officials realized that Ripley did not have a museum for tourists to delight in when coming by way of.

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Director Mike Ruben had his business established up with a different little place in the creating, and resolved to use it for a museum.

He decided to choose some assistance from a previous mayor of Ripley, in a strategy to carry additional folks to the metropolis.

“I took the thought from Don Fletcher,” Ruben said. “If you can not be the most significant museum, effectively perhaps you can be the smallest, and promote it that way and start drawing some focus to it.”

Ruben was uncertain if he would be equipped to build the smallest museum in The usa.

He investigated the present “smallest museum” in The usa to discover out, measurement intelligent, how modest it basically was. When he calculated the dimensions of the Ripley C.V.B. building, it was decided that he experienced them beat.

“I located out that there is a museum at a cafe in Arizona that encourages alone as acquiring America’s Smallest Museum,” he explained. “So, I received out the tape measure, and appeared at the dimensions and observed out that this museum is actually about 5 ft scaled-down.”

The museum is at the moment house to a lot of artifacts from the city of Ripley. It incorporates significant portraits of significant activities in the city’s heritage, these kinds of as the last public hanging in the condition of West Virginia, as perfectly as artwork from the 1st ever Mountain Condition Arts and Crafts competition, which was the first competition of it is sort in West Virginia history.

The museum is fairly entire at present, but they are often welcoming donations from inhabitants or others that want to showcase Ripley’s record.

“We don’t have a whole great deal of vacant house,” reported Ruben. “As individuals provide factors in, I like to rotate things in and out as we can. And who is aware of, when a person provides in some thing extremely intriguing then we’ll place it in a notable position if I believe it is anything that the community needs to see.”

Due to the fact the COVID-19 pandemic begun, visitation has not been as substantial as it was beforehand, but men and women like to come back and replicate on the time they have expended in Ripley.

“A ton of men and women that grew up in Ripley that moved absent and they come again and it delivers again a whole lot of reminiscences for them” Ruben said. “We’ve experienced every little thing from scout troops arrive in, prior to the COVID problem. And the historical modern society has been below and unique people today just like to appear in and reminisce about times long gone by.”

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