CASHMERE, Chelan County - I must have driven past the Pioneer Village and Museum a dozen times in recent years before finally pulling off Highway 2 to visit it. Turns out I'd been passing by a good thing. The museum, on the edge of the fruit-growing community of Cashmere in Central Washington, is a small-town delight. Run with a lot of love and volunteer labor by the Chelan County Historical Society, it showcases the lives and history of the 19th-century pioneer settlers and Native Americans who lived in this valley. On a scorching day earlier this month, I walked into the museum's airy new lobby and was greeted by old-timer Grace Keenan, one of the front-desk volunteers. A spry 84-year-old, she moved to Cashmere when she was 4 years old, traveling for days from Utah with her family in a Dodge truck along dirt roads. Now, standing ramrod straight in her pioneer-style long cotton skirt, she briskly doles out museum quiz sheets to eager children and advises adults on what to see first. The museum is surprisingly big for Cashmere, a sun-baked town of only 2,700 people that's best-known for its Aplets and Cotlets fruit-candy factory. The museum's main two-story building on the banks of the Wenatchee River has 11,000 square feet of displays including intricate woven baskets and other artifacts of the Indians who've lived in the valley for generations and old farm tools and household goods of whites who settled here in the late 1800s. For natural-history buffs, there are exhibits on local landscapes, from semi-desert to pine forest, and collections of minerals and petrified wood. But it's what outside the main building that will be most interesting to most visitors. In a grassy area alongside the river, 21 pioneer-era buildings have been assembled. The 19th-century cabins were moved from their original sites in the surrounding valley to be preserved here in what's called Pioneer Village. Visitors can wander into the cabins: each is filled with period furniture, dishes, even chamber pots under the beds. One cabin, a log home built in 1888, was home to the Richardsons, a family of 13 who established one of the first orchards in the area. Other cabins that once were homes to pioneer families have been outfitted as businesses typical of 19th-century Western towns. There's a saloon; a general store with a hand-operated coffee mill and a cracker barrel; and the Mission Hotel where modern-day visitors can slow down, sit around and play checkers on the shady front porch. "A lot of these buildings were moved to here by the Boy Scout troop here in town," said museum director Bill Rietveldt. "Some were taken apart and reassembled, like Lincoln logs. Some were moved all in one piece." "We have our eye on another turn-of-the-century building that we'd use as a library and visitor center," Rietveldt said. "A family here in town owns it and is talking to us about moving it . . . that could be an Eagle Scout project." One of the Pioneer Village cabins originally stood about 15 miles west, tucked into the woods by the Icicle River near Leavenworth. After it was moved to the museum, it was restored and outfitted as a frontier-style, two-cell jailhouse using the doors, bars and bunks from the old Cashmere jail. Later it was discovered that the one-room cabin had some real jailhouse connections: An escaped convict from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, built the cabin around 1900 and lived quietly in it. Next to Pioneer Village sits one of the museum's big attractions for kids of almost any age - an old-fashioned Great Northern Railroad caboose. While kids clamber through the wood caboose, adults congregate in the shade by a still-functioning waterwheel on the banks of the Wenatchee River. The wood waterwheel, built in 1891, scooped up water to irrigate fields. Although long supplanted by pumps and irrigation ditches, the waterwheel still lazily turns, its cascading water a welcome sound in this sun-scorched valley. |