Eastpointe military museum charges ahead with upgrades, 25-year lease

EASTPOINTE — The Michigan Military Technical & Historical Society Museum in Eastpointe has been approved for a 25-year lease.

Chris Causley, the museum’s president, said this was the big news in December, but there are other things that have been taken care of in recent months.

They’ve moved new vehicles into the museum, fixed a roof leak, started fixing the water damage from the leak and started getting new lights into the building. This includes LEDs for the inside that are better for the artifacts, and replacing some of the outside lights.

For this project, they’ve received a donation to help the upgrade.

“We got a large donation, monetary donation, from Rob Causley up at the Jim Causley GMC Buick to do some upgrading to the lights,” Causley said.

He said they also received a grant from the Historical Society of Michigan to update their cataloging system. They’re in the process of transferring data from a system called “Newsarch” to a system called “CatalogIt.”

Wendy Richardson, the museum’s treasurer, said this allows multiple people to access the system and lets them work from anywhere instead of only at the museum.

“With our current system, we’re limited to how many people can access the database at any given time because, again, it was free,” Richardson said.

Another goal is to get more artifacts on the floor. Richardson said Causley is always working on the pieces in the museum and that some of the vehicles don’t fit inside, so finding a way to get that equipment through the door is a priority.

“And some of those are things that will come to the museum, some of them are things that we use in parades, we would at some point like to have some sort of way to have all of our vehicles here,” Richardson said. “There’s a number of them that don’t fit inside so you know we’re still working on that.”

The biggest problem they’ve had, Causley said, is supply chain disruptions and issues. He said it has delayed getting some much-needed items including display mannequins that are specially made for museums, and some of the lights.

“We’re moving forward, but we’re running into the same thing everyone else is running into: supply chain issues,” Causley said.

COVID also caused some problems with the number of volunteers available to work on the museum.

“We’re an all-volunteer organization, so we’re having, you know, coming out of COVID, we’re still having trouble replenishing some of the volunteers,” Causley said. “We lost a couple volunteers during COVID ,and we had a number of volunteers that moved away during COVID.

“Now, we’re trying to bring people back, get some new people to help out,” Causley said.

Other than that, Causley said they are proceeding with their normal scheduling.

“We’re planning for our summer events that we do out at Chesterfield Historic (Village) with the three reenactments we do every year,” Causley said. “We’re hoping to bring the car show back this year. (We) kind of put that on hold during COVID. We’re hoping that we can bring that back starting this summer.”

Causley said the public has been happy with the museum.

“Most of the feedback we get is fairly positive,” Causley said. “Most people when they come here, they don’t expect it to be what it is. They expect it to be some little basement museum or something.”

Causley said they’ve even had positive feedback from people and professionals within the museum community.

“We’ve had, you know, other museum professionals asking, who do you hire to develop our exhibits, and we’re like, nobody, we do everything in house,” Causley said. “Must be doing something right.”

Richardson said their attendance is up, but the number of people in the building varies from day to day.

“It could be a horrible day outside and we can have a ton of people, or it could be incredibly sunny and we have a ton of people or the exact reverse,” Richardson said.

In the next couple of months, Causley said they would like to get some of the infrastructure things done, such as the lights and fixing up the back room. Richardson said she hopes they will be able to get a mural on the outside in the spring or the summer as well as getting the LEDs installed.