Joan Monninger: Hello. My name is Joan Monninger and I am the Executive Director of the Aztec Museum and Pioneer Village, located right on Main Street in historic downtown Aztec, New Mexico. It's my pleasure today to tell you a little about what we have to offer as a local community museum.

First, I should mention we're a private, not-for-profit museum, operated by the Aztec Museum Association, a 501(c)(3). So, we are self-funded, thanks to the generosity of our annual members, admission fees, sponsors and grants. We were founded in 1964. And so, we're getting ready to celebrate our 60th anniversary next year. In fact, we have a wonderful variety of special events, programming and a new exhibit to look forward to, but more on that later.

What you need to know. First, we are open seasonally, May through October, Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and off season by appointment. Our admission fee is $5 for adults, $3 for youth, and children five and under are free. We do offer several opportunities to visit for free throughout the year, including special events like our opening event in May, the Smithsonian's Free Museum Day in September, and other major events in Aztec, like the upcoming Aztec Fall Festival.

What does a visit to the museum look like? Well, visitors typically start in our main museum building. The building is the former Aztec City Hall. It's a big red brick building right on Main Street with easy parking out front. It was built in 1940 and was utilized as city hall until the 1960s when the new municipal complex was built just west of us.

The building has a changing exhibit in the main room. Right now, it features mid-century modern clothes and accessories, toys and collectibles, and a special case of items related to early Aztec schools. We also have a basketful of modern hats to try on. Upstairs, we have our Pioneer Room, featuring exhibits related to the early families who homesteaded the area. There's photographs, china, instruments and other miscellany.

Then, you head downstairs, where we have several rooms, including the Lovato Natural History Collection. Our guests love this. Willie Lovato was part of the Lovato family, who were part of the larger Hispano community in Gobernador. He traveled the world in the 1940s and '50s with his wife and brought back amazing things from across the globe. Seashells, rocks and minerals, and other unique collectibles. Things people out here had never seen before. We have about one-third of his total collection. Another third is at Fort Lewis College in Durango. And the rest is dispersed among family members. When the family reunions are happening out at Gobernador, we can always count on visits from family members wanting to see and share Uncle Willie's collection with a new generation.

 Also downstairs are pre-Puebloan artifacts from the Abrams collection and more. Mr. H.D. Abrams and his family homesteaded the land where Aztec ruins are and was the one to sell a portion to the government to preserve the ruins, now our friends and colleagues over at Aztec Ruins National Monument. We have items the family left to us as well as other artifacts related to the area's ancestral peoples, in addition to modern Native American artifacts and arts and crafts, including beautiful Navajo rugs, sand paintings and ceramics, including several pieces by renowned artist Maria Montoya Martinez.

Other rooms downstairs offer antique clothing with connections to the area's pioneer families, collectibles, a charming salt and pepper shaker collection, Ray Current's barbershop contents preserved from his early 20th Century barbershop in Aztec. This spring, we had some of the Current family descendants in town to see the old barber chairs and cedar backboards. We have an agricultural room with items from the Utton's Dairy and the county's orchard history.

Then, you go outside onto the grounds where we have 15 different structures, all full of artifacts. That is one of the fun things about our museum. Our artifacts, thousands of them, are out on display and not locked away. For many, it is a stroll down memory lane.

The Pioneer Village lets our visitors step back in time to get a feel for what a small pioneer town in the Southwest was like, what makes up a community. Some of the buildings are authentic, like the 1880 Hamblock Cabin where a New Year's Eve party shooting in 1880 helped spark the Stockton Cattle Wars. We have the 1906 Methodist Church from Cedar Hill. This was taken apart, moved, and then reassembled on our site, although size slightly smaller for the space. It has its original pews and hymnals, and it's really just a very lovely, serene setting. In fact, we rent it out for weddings and memorials. We have the original 1912 Aztec jail. We have other old buildings that we adapted to represent village essentials, like the Sheriff's Office, the Justice of the Peace and Magistrate's Office, the Doctor's Office. Of course, there's a general store and post office, blacksmith, and printing and tin shop. Our print shop, once the Schneider's Lumber Building from Flora Vista houses the Farmington Hustler Press Chandler and Price Printing Press. We have demos on the press a couple of times a year with special events thanks to Norman and Deani Garrison and Devin Neely. We love having them here and bringing the old press back to life. We have an authentic two-seater outhouse by the cabin. This is for display purposes only, please. We have all variety of old tractors and farm and ranching equipment and implements, including a 1920s threshing machine. We have old oil and gas items, including a gas buggy from an atomic detonation at Carson National Forest, as well as an old oilfield doghouse and a 1920s Fort Worth sputter drilling rig. All kinds of artifacts everywhere and every size.

We also have newer replica buildings to help round out our Pioneer Village experience. We have a one-room schoolhouse and even offer a special program for an all-day one-room schoolhouse experience for kids in the summer. They get to wear pinafore aprons or suspenders. They get their lunch in a little metal pail. They play games and have a craft. And otherwise, they stick to reading, writing and arithmetic using slates and chalk and just having a great time spending a day in the past. They may even get a little appreciation for the modern conveniences of the regular classrooms, especially air conditioning.

We have a bank that houses the original teller cages from Aztec's First Citizens Bank. Our teller is a mannequin named Mabel. And yes, we're one of those old timey community museums with mannequins, or scary mannequins, as some kids say when they are surprised entering a building. There's a 1920s farmhouse and a replica Denver and Rio Grande caboose that was built from an original freight car. Speaking of cars, we have a 1927 Model TT Ford truck. There really is so much to see and experience, I'm not doing it justice.

I want you all to know how beautiful our grounds are with all variety of flowers from spring to fall, then the colors of fall later in the season. We have members that just like to enjoy a little peace and nostalgia, sitting for a while on village benches and watching for butterflies, or maybe just sitting alone with their thoughts, right on memory lane.

Obviously, we're a roadside attraction here on Highway 550 for domestic and international travelers. We've had visitors this season from 36 different states and 14 countries. But we also house a wonderful 1960s era Route 66 Roadside Attraction. This is a 3,000-pound rotating cyclorama called Pecos West. It features over 100 hand-carved pieces with scenes of the Southwest. It's a tremendous piece of folk art and is featured as a Roadside America attraction. It's located in our Annex building on the grounds, where we also house more oil and gas items, as well as a military exhibit honoring the area's veterans.

Literally, we have something for everyone and then some we also have an entertainment pavilion where we are able to have guest presenters and Chautauqua lecturers, as well as hosting bands for our free summer concert series, thanks to the Connie Gotch Arts Foundation. What makes our concerts a really special experience that people keep coming back for is the ambiance of the Pioneer Village, with our covered wagon and buggies setting around, and beautiful New Mexico evenings. We have a covered stage, great acoustics, chairs and bleachers, as well as guests who bring their own camp chairs.

Our concerts are curated by Artistic Director Hoyle Osborne, who's also one of our musicians. We host monthly outdoor family movies out on the grass behind our one-room schoolhouse. It's really just a wonderful venue. And I don't want to forget, last month we hosted a sing-along concert of old regional music from our sheet music collection, and that was fun for everyone. Even those who had planned not to sing couldn't resist Home on the Range.

 I do have a disclaimer for caregivers. The Pioneer Village has plank boardwalks, gravel walkways, concrete sidewalks, some steep ramps and uneven surfaces. This can make it a bit challenging for folks with mobility issues if they don't have a caregiver to assist.

If you have any questions, you can always reach me at 505-334-9829. We offer school and group tours all year by appointment, and it's great to pair us with a visit to Aztec Ruins. We also house a newspaper, photo and document archive collection that members can make use of, and non-members and researchers by request, including the Henry Jackson Photography Collection.

 The museum is located at 125 North Main in Aztec. While our season end happens with safe treats on Halloween, we will be open for Aztec sparkles with a hot cocoa and cookies open house on December 9th. This next year, we'll again host our free old-fashioned Easter egg hunt in the Pioneer Village the Saturday before Easter. We have wonderful things planned for 2024 in our 60th anniversary around the theme, What We Keep, Material Culture and Historical Interpretation. As you know, we all have things we keep that are meaningful to us and in some ways define us.

We'll have a new exhibit with new items that recently came into our collection, new information labels, and more speakers, including tentatively, Navajo Nation's first poet laureate, Luci Tapahonso; Fred Friedman on railroad history; a panel discussion on The Lost Communities of Navajo Dam, moderated by Patti Tharp; more music concerts and other events all season long.

So, please stay tuned and plan to visit us at the Aztec Museum in Pioneer Village and come explore Aztec for a great small-town experience. Thank you so much.