History museum has fireproof plan

The destruction of the Isanti County Historical Society Heritage Center and 75 percent or more of its contents on July 8 in Cambridge was not just upsetting for Isanti County.

“Both Penny [Quast] and I shuddered,” said Mille Lacs County Historical Society (MLCHS) board director Barry Schreiber.

Quast is president of the MLCHS board that runs the MLCHS depot museum at Tenth Avenue and First Street in Princeton.

“It’s scary to think someone could do this,” said Quast, president of the MLCHS. “It’s really sad we could lose everything (if a fire broke out at Princeton’s history center).”

She noted how investigators determined that the Isanti Heritage Center fire was arson.

Schreiber said the Isanti County Heritage Center fire made them contemplate the thought of a fire burning the history museum in Princeton. The depot center was once a Great Northern train depot that was ordered built by railway magnate James J. Hill. The structure was built in the Queen Anne architectural style in 1902.

The chance that a place can catch fire is very real, said Schreiber. He noted that the old Great Northern depot in Princeton had a sister depot built about the same time in Bellingham, Wash., and that it burned in about 1925. That left Princeton having the only remaining depot of its kind.

“It’s clear that it is not just a theoretical possibility,” Schreiber said of a depot being destroyed by fire. “It has happened.”

Quast also decided since the Isanti County Heritage Center fire that she will be moving documents to one or more safety deposit boxes.

While Schreiber and Quast shuddered just from hearing about the fire over in Cambridge, MLCHS board members Betty and Glenn Jensen of Princeton decided to check out the fire scene on July 10.

Betty explained that she has family connections with Isanti going back two generations, noting that she is of Swedish heritage. Fortunately, tool artifacts her dad had that had been given to the Isanti County Historical Society were in another building than the one that burned, she said.

“When we were there (on July 10) volunteers were going through photographs (in the burnt remains),” Jensen said. She noted that a freezer truck was parked there and that wet, damaged documents were brought into the freezer truck.

Kathleen McCully, director of the Isanti County Historical Society, said by phone last week that a freeze-drying company was handling the documents. If documents that get wet are not dried within 48 hours mold can set in, Schreiber explained.

Big questions now loom for the MLCHS board, which are: What does the depot history center in Princeton have for fire prevention and fire suppression?

Quast made a quick call last Thursday to Deluxe Services in St. Paul Park, which monitors alarms in the depot history center, and reached Mike Timmers, owner of the alarm business. Timmers said the system at the depot center in Princeton includes motion and smoke detectors.

He explained that if the smoke alarm is activated, it would alert the Princeton fire department and an activated motion alarm would alert the police.

But the depot history center does not have a fire sprinkler system, which would be a set of sprinklers mounted in the ceiling that would become activated by fire.

Schreiber says that if there was such a system, there would have to first be a study whether sprinklers should go in all rooms at the center, since it isn’t good to soak historical documents with water.