1940s cuisine offered at Floyd County Historical Museum at open house Saturday

By James Grob, jgrob@charlescitypress.com

Patrons can enjoy some 1940s-style cuisine Saturday at the Floyd County Historical Museum in Charles City.

The museum is hosting an open house, which includes free admission for everyone, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The event will serve as an opportunity to see the “1940s Childhood Nostalgia” exhibit, which was researched, designed and installed by the museum’s Junior Historians Xander Graeser and Carter Haberkorn.

To compliment that exhibit, some light 1940s hors d’oeuvres will be served. Included will be a classic 1940s punch, a dessert fruit salad that was popular in the 1940s, a side dish and an all-in-one meal dish prepared by museum Director Jennifer Thiele.

“It was a dish that was very popular in the 1940s, and was advertised as a meal that could feed the entire family in one dish,” Thiele said. “It was a casserole, but in a gelatin loaf.”

Thiele said the dish has meat, vegetables and cream cheese “all in there kind of pulverized and settled into gelatin.”

The open house will also serve as a closing reception for “The Making of Minnneapolis-Moline” exhibit, which will be coming down later this month, so this will be the last opportunity for tractor enthusiasts to see that display.

The new exhibit will be “Unforgettable Businesses,” and Thiele has plans to rearrange and redesign the entire main floor gallery at the museum to make room that display.

That exhibit will include old historic business signs from throughout the county, brought out of storage and highlighted — telling the stories of those old Floyd County businesses.

The Charles City Railroad Club will also have the model railroad room at the museum open Saturday, with the trains running. The museum will also be open Sunday from 1-4 p.m.

The Floyd County Museum in Charles City is one of the Midwest’s largest rural county museums. Thiele said that they have recently been working on sorting inventory at the museum, and she said there are now close to 300,000 artifacts depicting early and recent prairie life, both agricultural and industrial.

Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the museum opened its climate-controlled exhibit area in 1999, featuring historic farm tractors, implements and tools of the last century.

The museum is open to the public every Wednesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.