The Neville Blog

200 years ago a cheerful holiday feast was held just across the street from the museum near Leicht Park at Fort Howard.   Once a fort officer, Col. McNeil (later commander of Fort Howard 1824-1825), found out how important it was to the French residents of the area to celebrate Christmas, he planned an elaborate party.   The officers invited the French, the Americans, and native people living in the area.   The 4’ o’clock dinner is said to have fed a hundred people.   The evening included a feast of fish, bear, and porcupine along with a dance that lasted late into the night.   An Invitation addressed to Mrs. Lawe for a ball at Fort Howard in 1820. A local land surveyor who attended the fort’s Christmas dinner/dance in 1823 describes the evening...    The hall was well filled… men and women, were attired in all the grades of dress, from the highest partisan down to the buck-skin coats, pants, petticoat, and moccasins of the aboriginals.   Ye...

“December 7, 1941 A Date Which Will Live in Infamy” – President Franklin D. Roosevelt The United States entered World War II after a devastating attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. The war affected everyday life in the United States, this wedding dress is one example. Katherin Pierick Williams wore this dress when she married U.S. Navy photographer Alan North Williams just three weeks after the attack.   Williams was at Pearl Harbor during the attacks. He survived and even took photographs of the events. The dress is part of the Neville Public Museum’s collection and the photographs are cared for by the Wisconsin Historical Society. You can see the two together and more stories like this in “Guns and Gowns” open through February 2021. This war changed the entire structure of the fashion industry.   Paris fell to the Germans in 1940 and no longer inspired American and British designers.   Britain, feeling the harsh effects of the war, struggle...

Each year the museum puts together holiday displays from our collection of figurines that once decorated the windows at H.C. Prange Co. in downtown Green Bay. Dolls of Christmas Past are displayed in vignettes on our stage and Snow Babies play outside our gift shop.  One thing you may have noticed in recent years is that the museum decided not to have our dolls move.  After extensive review of the dolls’ conditions the decision as made to not plug them in for a variety of reasons.  As with all our exhibits, when they are completed we inventory and do condition reports before returning the artifacts back to storage. After Holiday Memories in 2016, we did an extensive condition report of the artifacts. In looking closely we discovered evidence of stress. Piles of rust at the feet of some of the figures are a clue that something was happening internally that we cannot see on the outside. Rust is caused by corrosion, a natural process where metal is gradually destroyed....