Museum staying put, buying present site

Banner Graphic/Eric Bernsee With the purchase of the building in which it is housed, the Putnam County Museum will soon have the opportunity to expand, Museum President Warren Macy announced Sunday.

Meet the new Putnam County Museum home ... same as the old Putnam County Museum home.

The Who? No, more like The Where.

And that where will continue to be the old Kroger/Peoples Drugs-Haag Pharmacy-Hook’s building just south of the railroad viaduct on Greencastle’s North Side.

The Putnam County Museum is buying the building from owner Mark Timm, who uses the larger, southern section of the facility (the old Kroger side) as a warehouse for his Cottage Garden Inc. business.

Museum Board President Warren Macy announced that development Sunday afternoon at the start of the museum’s 2017 annual meeting at its 1105 N. Jackson St. location.

“The big thing this year is the building,” Macy said, noting that a task force had been exploring options for a permanent museum home over a series of meetings.

After exploring “site after site after site,” Macy said, the task force members “had strong feelings both ways” about either staying in its current building or moving to a new facility.

The closest the museum came to relocating, Macy said, was the possibility of purchasing the Greencastle Masonic Temple building at Washington and Vine streets.

However, that would have required “about $3 million to move into,” Macy said of the cost of renovation, handicap accessibility and the addition of an elevator. That still would have left minimal parking with that building.

The museum task force also checked on the lot adjacent to Greencastle Offset at the northwest corner of Jackson and Walnut streets, a site that has been vacant since the old Daily Banner burned down in the late 1960s.

“It ended up it was only slightly less to build new,” Macy said alluding to the $3 million renovation he mentioned previously.

Macy told the Banner Graphic the museum folks looked at some of the usual suspects around town as well, ruling out the old Marsh store as too expensive, the old jail as too impractical for a museum with minimal available display space and the old Central Bank building John Dillinger robbed on the south side of the square as another major renovation despite its intriguing possibilities because of his infamy.

So faced with the possibility of soon having “no place to go and no place to store our collection,” Macy said the Museum Board of Directors voted to purchase the building on contract from Timm.

“If we didn’t move forward,” Macy added, “we’d be left with only one year left on our contract.”

The deal allows Timm up to five years to relocate his Cottage Garden merchandise and permit the museum to use the entire building, Macy said.