- Owyhee County couple amasses amazing collection
-
By Tim Woodward Idaho Statesman
- Boise Idaho (www.idahostatesman.com)
Edition Date: 03/05/07
Jack Lawson shows off the service station display along the
tour of the Emu-Z-um in Grand View, Idaho. He keeps a photo of himself at his
father's service station in 1940 propped up on one of the old gas pumps. For
Jack and Belva Lawson the museum is a labor of love. They will personally take
you around to every display, which will take a couple hours and cheerfully
answer any questions.
Kerry Maloney / Idaho Statesman
GRAND VIEW — When Jack and Belva Lawson began their Emu-Z-Um
in a remote stretch of the Owyhee County desert, almost no one gave it a chance
of amounting to much.
Almost everyone was wrong about
that.
Since publication of a Statesman
story after the Emu-Z-Um's opening in 1998, the Lawsons have been conducting up
to four tours a day and have exponentially expanded their offerings. Literally
thousands of items are exhibited, from toys to sheep wagons to the former
contents of the Silver City museum. A typical tour takes two hours. To see and
appreciate everything properly would take days.
"When we started, it was just
a hobby," Belva Lawson said. "We like to collect things. We never
thought people would come all the way out here in the middle of nowhere to see
them."
They come at the rate of several
thousand visitors a year to see the out-of-the-way museum's collection of Idaho
oddments, Old West artifacts and other bits of Americana. The emus the Lawsons
once raised commercially, and for which the museum was named, are down to just
a few pets now. They're about the only things that haven't multiplied.
Bruneau rancher Tom Hall, a
longtime Owyhee County Historical Society member and himself the owner of a
ranching museum, calls the Emu-Z-Um "a masterpiece."
"They have about everything
you could think of — a whole raft of Silver City artifacts, Bruneau and Grand
View artifacts, almost a whole town set up with a blacksmith shop, a
barbershop," he said. "I don't know where to start."
The collection started when Jack
Lawson was a boy growing up in Owyhee County, where cows still outnumber
people.
"We didn't have theaters or
bowling alleys then," he said. "Collecting was my entertainment.
I'd go out in the desert and pick up bottles and arrowheads."
Belva liked to collect bowls and
picture frames. The two became high school sweethearts when he was a Bruneau
Bobcat and she was a Grand View Devil. They've been married 48 years. It was
inevitable that their collections would merge.
"It's hard to believe that all
this stuff is the work of just two crazy people," Belva said, laughing.
The amount of
"stuff" has grown so much that they built a new home overlooking
the Snake River and use the old one for displays. They've built or brought in
other buildings to display the rest.
"We never throw anything
away," Belva said. "We just hang it on a wall."
Refined from its early days, when
parts of it resembled an overgrown junk pile, much of the collection is
meticulously displayed according to themes. Many themes have their own room or
building. The museum has a beauty shop, boutique, hunting lodge, dentist's
office, church, saloon, sheriff's office, bank, post office, schoolhouse,
laundry, tool room, radio room, children's room, model railroad, soda fountain
…
It has an old house brimming with
antiques, a 1950s kitchen, an Indian room with arrowheads, paintings,
cradleboards and regalia. A Western room decorated with bits, bridles, spurs,
saddles and chaps; a drive-in restaurant staffed by a mannequin on roller
skates; a service station with a vintage gas pump and a Model A car and truck.
The sports room now has a
BSU theme. Unlike most of the displays, it's as contemporary as its Fiesta
Bowl posters and a white football signed by Coach Pete.
Former BSU and NFL player
Rolly Woolsey donated some autographed photos.
"The place is
fabulous," Woolsey said. "To tell you the truth, I was shocked
when I went out there. I expected to spend 15 minutes and ended up looking
around for two hours."
The actual number of items the
Lawsons have collected is unknown but enormous.
They have baseballs, bats,
fielder's gloves, catcher's mitts, catcher's masks and chest protectors,
vintage baseball magazines.
They have an ore wagon from Sun
Valley, sheepwagons from Grasmere, a buckboard from Nampa, an organ from a
church in Weiser, the counter and board-room doors from the Bruneau State Bank,
a mailbox from the post office in Grand View, a barn from Eagle and a
200-year-old cemetery gate from Missouri.
They have a farm-machinery
collection, toy-truck collection, whistle collection, pocketknife collection,
beer-can collection, salt-and-pepper-shaker collection and 7,000 fruit, milk,
liquor, soda and medicine bottles — many of them antiques.
A very partial listing of the
collection's more bizarre items would include alfalfa-seed screeners, an
egg-vending machine, moonshine still, scales for weighing eggs, insulators from
power poles, chicken brooders and de-beakers, antique milkshake makers, corn
shellers, a pink pay phone and a 1952 fire truck.
The collection grew significantly
in 2000, when the Lawsons purchased the contents of the structurally threatened
museum in Silver City. Housed in two buildings on their ranch, it includes Old
West artifacts ranging from a 1908 wedding dress to a stove for heating irons
used in a Chinese laundry.
"It's the history of Silver
City from 1862 on," Jack Lawson said. "It took our life savings
to buy it, but we wanted to keep it here in Owyhee County. If we hadn't, it
would have been auctioned and scattered all over the country."
Ranchers most of their lives, the
Lawsons are down to raising 20 acres of hay now. He's 68; she's 66. Proceeds
from museum admissions supplement their Social Security and help add to their
ever-growing collection.
"We have another couple of
rooms and another building we still want to do," Belva said.
"If we don't get too
old," her husband added. "It's hard to know when to stop. We have
more stuff we could put out for the tours, but we don't want to overdo it.
People get too tired."
Contact reporter Tim Woodward at
twoodward@idahostatesman.com or 377-6409.
---------------
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Visit the Emu-Z-Um
WHERE: 22142 River Road in Owyhee County, about a mile off
Idaho 78 between Oreana and Grand View. A sign marks the turnoff.
HOURS: The museum is open during the winter by appointment. Appointments
may be made by calling 208-834-2397. It's open the rest of the year on weekends
from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on weekdays by appointment.
COST: Admission is $5 for adults, $2.50 for children 6-12.
The Times-News - Twin Falls, Idaho (www.times-news.com)
Sep. 3, 2006 -- This may be my
single favorite man-made attraction in Idaho. On the site of their emu ranch
outside Grand View, Jack and Belva Lawson have set up a replica of an 1860s
town, complete with the contents of the Silver City Schoolhouse Museum.
Displays include period clothing,
antique farm implements, a hand-built automobile and a train station with model
trains on display. Don't miss the antique egg-vending machine.
Get there: Take Interstate 84 to Mountain Home, then turn south on
Highways 51 and then 67. Grand View is 23 miles southwest of Mountain Home
(alternatively you can exit I-84 at Hammett and take Highway 78 west). It's a
two-hour drive from Twin Falls.
Jack Lawson shows off the service station display along the
tour of the Emu-Z-um in Grand View, Idaho. He keeps a photo of himself at his
father's service station in 1940 propped up on one of the old gas pumps. For
Jack and Belva Lawson the museum is a labor of love. They will personally take
you around to every display, which will take a couple hours and cheerfully
answer any questions.
