Door County History - A Story of People and Places is the first of a series of educational exhibits in the Door Community Auditorium’s Link Gallery that will focus on the Friends of Gibraltar’s school-year theme of Door County history. The current exhibit opened on November 18 with the Elders' Wisdom, Children’s Songs^TM  Community Celebration in honor of four community elders--Baldomero Jaurgeui, Eunice Rutherford, Nancy Sargent and Dale Seaquist. Gibraltar Elementary students in grades 4 and 5 interviewed the elders and then worked with Larry Long from the Community Celebration of Place organization to write and perform songs honoring them. The stories of these honored elders are told in the exhibit with narratives, song lyrics, photographs and items of importance from their lives. Photographs of the elders and the students who interviewed them were taken by Chris Miller from Miller Studio.

The story of places includes four historical buildings: the Eagle Bluff Lighthouse in Peninsula State Park, the Ephraim Moravian Church, Wilson’s Ice Cream Parlor and Restaurant in Ephraim, and the Rock Island Boathouse.  The exhibit provides a written history of each building along with painted images and current and historical photographs. The images of the buildings tell a part of Door County history and give insight into a changing sense of place.  Gibraltar Elementary students created paintings of each of the buildings and Gibraltar High School art students took photographs of the three mainland sites.  The historical photographs were collected from the Eagle Bluff Lighthouse Museum, the Ephraim Historical Foundation, and the Friends of Rock Island. Gibraltar High School students are processing additional black and white 35mm images that will be added to the exhibit in December.

All of the photographs were scanned, enlarged and printed by Dan Cross with Idea Studio. 

Door County History – A Story of People and Places will be on exhibit in The Link through January 14. The next exhibit in this series opens in late January and will include items from the Gibraltar Historical Association’s collection by Karin Kopischke entitled Garments of Our Foundation – Pioneer Women and Gibraltar Middle and High School student artwork created with Karin Kopischke.