The Meeker Homestead Museum, operated by the Delaware County Historical Society and located in the home built by Forrest Meeker in the 1820s, is now open for the 2019 season.
New for this year is the “Great Beginnings” exhibit, presented in collaboration between Benny Shoults, DCHS curator, and Ohio Wesleyan University history students from professors Barbara Terzian’s and Dawn Chisebe’s class “African-Americans and U.S. Law.”
Students in the class include Keionna Badie, Jayson Blankenship, Quentin Broomfield, Justin Friday, Miko Harper, Carrie Kubicki, Shannon Leimbach, Tiff Moore, Tyler Palmer, Marquis Sena and Sixin Wang. The class attended the museum’s 2019 opening on Sunday, April 28.
The new exhibit features six people who got their start in Delaware and went on to do great things: E.W.B. Curry, the first African-American school teacher for the city of Delaware and founder of the Curry Normal and Industrial Institute; Horace Newton Allen, a medical doctor and the first American Protestant missionary in Korea; Mabel Cratty, a Delaware City Schools teacher and principal; and General Secretary of the YWCA Amos Dolbear, a physicist and inventor of the “talking telegraph”; Frank Sherwood Rowland, Nobel Laureate for the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons contribute to ozone depletion; and Dr. Ezra Vogel, considered one of the nation’s foremost experts of family life in the Far East and sponsor of the annual Vogel Lectures each Spring at OWU.
The museum, at 2690 Stratford Road, Delaware, is open to the public every Sunday from 2-5 p.m. Admission is free, but a donation of $5 is suggested to help defray operating costs. The society is currently looking for additional docents to greet visitors and give tours. For more information, email [email protected] or call 740-369-3831, extension 3.
