HOUGHTON — The Carnegie Museum building will remain closed through summer but will continue to be open virtually and continue to release new on-line exhibits and programs throughout the season.

To best ensure the health and safety of both our visitors and our volunteers, at a recent board meeting we made the tough but necessary decision to remain closed this summer. We feel it more important to devote our limited staff and resources to creating more on-line content and programs than to the continual cleaning and sanitizing necessary in order to re-open to the public safely.

Throughout the summer we will release more virtual exhibits and live-stream programs including a virtual tour of the museum and histories of several of the buildings along Shelden Ave., virtual Music at the Museum, events related to the celebration of women’s suffrage, and about the Keweenaw’s Natural History.

We will reassess after Labor Day and make a decision about re-opening the building based on conditions at that time.

Thank you for your understanding. Now pull up your comfiest chair and “go to the museum!”

In Beyond Brothels and Bars: Discovering Women’s Roles in One Mining Community, author and local history enthusiast, Jean Ellis, challenges us to ask how we know the things we know. Using the 1910 census and other period records to reveal “the roles that women played for Beyond Brothels and Bars,” Ellis work tests many widely-held assumptions about the women of Calumet Township, Michigan.

In the live-stream presentation, Ellis will talk about the process and discoveries made from examining reams of records, creating a 2013 exhibit, “A Woman’s Place,” and finally, in 2020, writing the book — “Beyond Brothels and Bars”.

The live-stream talk with moderator Faith Morrison will be held Thursday, June 18 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Click on this link up to ten minutes before. You can also access the live-stream directly by visiting the Carnegie Museum Facebook page: facebook.com/Carnegie-Museum, or visiting the website at CarnegieKeweenaw.org.