The COVID-19 pandemic turned out to be the final nail in the coffin for the financially struggling Powers Museum along Route 66 in Carthage, Missouri.
The museum opened in 1988, though it was offering programs several years before that.
The museum’s board members told the Joplin Globe the facility had only enough money left to keep the lights on and pay for insurance for two years. So members decided to shut it down and create scholarships with the leftover money after the museum’s collection is dispersed.
The Carthage School District then will take over the building and grounds and plans to use them to help struggling students.
The report states the pandemic was the final blow for the museum at 1617 Oak St. (aka Route 66):
The museum has struggled in the past few years with a shrinking endowment and falling income. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Income was not meeting expenses, and it has dropped drastically in the past year,” Powers board member Duane Griffith said. “We haven’t had much in donations to meet the bottom line, and our net loss since July is $13,000.”
“COVID really killed it,” added board President Kavan Stull. “We just couldn’t do anything with COVID. Everything just shut down.”
The board met in late January to decide to wind down operations, legally shut down the nonprofit organization and transfer the property to the school district.
The board plans to sell some of its collection at Memorial Hall in Carthage on Aug. 19-21. Whatever it won’t sell, the museum will give to interested residents or entities.
A year ago, the museum provided a virtual tour of the facility. You can skip ahead to the six-minute mark because of technical difficulties with the presentation:
The museum was a gift from Marian Powers Winchester and named in honor of her parents. She left a bequest to the city for the museum after her death in 1981.
(Image of the Powers Museum in Carthage, Missouri, via its Facebook page)
good people in Carthage. I’d been on the road (66) for days without a proper bath/shower. I drove into town and stopped at a laundromat to take a quick sponge bath in the rest room. I off-handedly asked a gentleman who was folding his cloths where a fellow could get a shower. He said, “follow me”. He led me to the local YMCA. The nicest Y I’d ever been to. I left a donation not so much for the shower but for the nice gesture. I did the same on the way back to LA. a lot of nice people on Route 66
I’m very, very sorry to hear this. The Powers Museum was a wonderful place. I’ll never forget an artistic joke I saw there. There was a painting of a farm boy, dressed rather rustically, and holding a chicken. It took me a couple minutes to get the joke: it was a parody of Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy.” I busted out laughing so hard that it startled some of the staff, even more so because, I began to suspect only afterwards, that some people had never seen the Blue Boy, even in pictures, and didn’t get it. The Powers Museum always got high marks from me.