Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area and the Bates County Historical Society, Inc. are pleased to announce the Bates County Museum is the recipient of an Interpretive Grant in the amount of $5,000 for the design and implementation of a new website that provides a user friendly site to accommodate mobile phones and other devices along with standard computers.
The old website could not easily be viewed on a phone screen, making it difficult for anyone attempting to retrieve information about the Bates County Museum. The grant funding allowed the development of a user friendly website that can be maintained by Museum staff. The Museum is very pleased with the new site and expects to be adding even more pages, photos, and information in the coming weeks.
The Freedom’s Frontier Interpretive Grand program was started in 2012. Since then, more than 125 projects have been awarded grant funding, on both sides of the Missouri-Kansas border, in the 41 county region that comprises the heritage area. Grants range in amount from under $1,500 to $5,000. All awards over $1,500 require that the grant recipient show a local match of half the amount of the award. This match can be in the form of cash, or in-kind donations and staff and volunteer time. Chris Wimsatt, Family Researcher at the Bates County Museum, headed the website project and worked closely with a website developer to create the new site. Chris’ knowledge of technology allowed for the Museum’s in-kind contribution to consist of his many hours of work in entering photos and text information for the new site.
Freedom’s Frontier was established as a heritage area on October 12, 2006, when signed into law by President George W. Bush. There are 49 heritage areas in the U. S. and they are nonprofit affiliates of the National Park Service. The Bates County Museum has been an active Freedom’s Frontier Partner since 2006 and Museum Director, Peggy Buhr, serves on the Board of Trustees as the Missouri Partners Liaison and Kay Caskey, of Caskey Paralegal Services, is also a Trustee for Freedom’s Frontier.
The Bates County Museum is grateful to have been a recipient of an Interpretive Grant and is pleased to provide the public with easy and accessible information about the Museum. It is the hope of the Museum staff and Board of Directors that this new website will generate more web traffic which may then result in more visitors to the Museum, Butler, and to Bates County. The website address is:www.batescountymuseum.org. To learn more about Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area visit their website at:www.freedomsfrontier.org.
-our thanks to Peggy Buhr
