The Benton County Historical Society invites the public to attend a kickoff celebration for a yearlong fundraising campaign honoring the 100th anniversary of the Horner Museum collection. The event will run from 6-9 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 20 at the Corvallis Museum. Tickets are $45 and can be purchased online.
Organizers said the event will be a bird-themed party with evening also featuring an opening of the museum’s upstairs exhibit, “Put a Bird On it: Finley, Feathers, & Fashion.”
“Feathered and fowl-themed attire is encouraged but not required,” organizers said.
The first-come, first-serve event will offer catered appetizers and drinks as well as family-friendly and adult activities that include bird mask making, face painting, wooden egg-and-spoon races, caricatures, a Polaroid photo booth, a museum-wide scavenger hunt, unique raffle items and guest visitors from the Chintimini Wildlife Center.
“Because we opened the Corvallis Museum during the pandemic, we didn’t have an opportunity to offer a grand-opening celebration,” BCHS Executive Director Jessica Hougen said through a press release. “This event is the first large social occasion we’ve had, so we’re going all out.”
The exhibit opening in the upstairs Verhoeven Gallery will include contemporary art, historic photographs, taxidermy birds and historic fashion pieces.
The Horner Museum opened in 1925 as part of Oregon State University, which at the time was called Oregon Agricultural College. The collection includes artifacts of global and natural history as assembled by professor John B. Horner.
For several years, the museum was housed in the OSU library’s basement and moved several times as part of campus expansion projects, eventually ending up in the basement of Gill Coliseum. When it closed in the late 1990s, the collection had nearly 60,000 artifacts.
The collection went into storage and after a long negotiation, the artifacts were transferred to the Benton County Historical Society. They are now housed in the Johnson Collections Center in Philomath. Select artifacts go on display in both the Philomath and Corvallis museums.