Urgent Call for Support!

The State Historical Society of Iowa has extended our access to the remaining money of our emergency acquisition and stabilization grant—about $7,400.00 of matching money that we can use for stabilization projects. We need to raise the matching $7,400.00 in cash-only donations and spend that on qualifying stabilization projects by November 30, 2011. Therefore we need larger (tax-deductible) donations immediately in order to get the matching state reimbursements, arrange and complete the projects. This matching grant doubles your contribution! Please donate as much and as soon as you can. Please make checks payable to Preservation Iowa with “Ira Sturdevant House Fund” in the memo line or cover letter. Mail to: Ira Sturdevant House; Preservation Iowa; P.O. Box 814; Mt. Pleasant, IA 52641.

“We need to preserve buildings that speak directly to those of us whose families had calluses, as well as to those who had carriages. It’s a fine thing to exhibit the aesthetic best out of the past, but it can be equally important to interpret the ways men and women worked and created and played. … Let’s speak to Americans in terms that add meaning to their own everyday lives, that place their jobs, their responsibilities as citizens and parents, in historic context so that they see their present problems, not as exceptions, but as continuations of the challenges faced by their forefathers.”

Louis C. Jones in Three Eyes on the Past: Exploring New York Folk Life (Syracuse University Press, 1982), 13.

[Louis C. Jones was Director, New York State Historical Association, the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, a co-founder of the New York Folklore Society.]

Rick Sturdevant and Preservation Iowa’s Rod Scott with square nail donation.