On Sunday, March 21, noted exhibit designer Ches Crow will describe what visitors to the new annex at the Wake Forest Birthplace Museum will soon see.
            The occasion will be the third quarterly meeting for the Wake Forest Historical Association, and association members and interested area residents are invited to the free event from 3 to 5 p.m. in the fellowship hall at St. John’s Episcopal Church, 830 Durham Road, Wake Forest. Refreshments will be served, and the association is still accepting $10 memberships for 2010.
            The new museum behind the Calvin Jones House on North Main Street has long been a dream for the Wake Forest College Birthplace Society, which owns the property, and the current estimate calls for the building to be complete sometime in May. Members of the historical association are planning to hold the fourth quarterly meeting – a concert by Kathaleen Chandley playing the rosewood grand piano now in the front parlor of the Calvin Jones House – in the new museum.
            The exhibits in the new building will portray the area through the centuries, from its earliest human inhabitants through today. Wake Forest was not just a college town though that was a dominant factor from the early 1800s through 1956 when the college moved to Winston-Salem. The Calvin Jones House sits on the old college athletic field between the state’s first railroad to the east and the first federal highway to the west, and Crow plans to show how those transportation arteries shaped and influenced the town. The whistle that signaled the start and close of the work day at the Royall Cotton Mill will be prominently displayed as well as advertisements and displays from the downtown where merchants served the college, townspeople and farmers from the area.
            The historical association, Crow and Ed Morris, the museum’s executive director, are still seeking more mementos, relics and artifacts to illustrate the town’s history, everything from farm implements to home décor from any age, from diaries to high school annuals and newspapers, from oddities to items once common but now almost forgotten. Does anyone have a Hoover cart?
            Crow is an artist, writer, consultant, illustrator and historian who has been on the staff of the North Carolina Museum of History and worked with a number of museums in the state to provide both static and interactive displays and programs.