Museum Makeover
Renovations planned for Round-Up Museum
A cutout of world champion barrel racer Nellie Williams Miller is posed alongside trophy saddles in the Red Bluff Round-Up Museum. The museum will undergo a renovation. Photo by Dave Ramelli.
Red Bluff, Calif. (March 15, 2018) – The Red Bluff Round-Up Museum is getting a face lift.
With 97 years of rodeo, cowboys, cowgirls, horses, bulls, and memories, the Round-Up museum is being renovated.
Red Bluff resident Joan Growney has taken on the volunteer task of organizing the effort.
The museum’s first president, George Froome, who was a Round-Up director for 27 years, collected pictures, of which the museum is full. “If it weren’t for him,” Growney said, the museum “wouldn’t be here.” The photos in the museum are being digitized and categorized so that electronic searches can be done by using keywords.
Growney has plans for the museum. She is working on getting cases for items that are closed and is collecting halters from Round-Up stock contractors to hang on the wall. A halter from Flying U Rodeo Co., Cotton and Reno Rosser, is already secured. Plans are in place to purchase a projector and a twelve-foot drop down screen so that youth can learn about agriculture and rodeo in the Museum. “I have a vision,” she said. The museum will be used “for education, and it needs to start from the ground up, when kids are first grade.”
The museum and volunteers are asking the public for Round-Up memorabilia and pictures they would like to donate to the museum. She is also requesting residents to visit the museum in hopes they can identify family members who have ties to the Round-Up and might be included in old pictures the museum owns.
One of the more important pictures in the museum is a picture that hung in the L&M Café for years. The picture, which is about three feet tall and 25 feet long and was taken in 1921, has water and tobacco stains on it and is of one of first rodeo play days at the fairgrounds. The picture is being digitized and cleaned. The original one will be put away safely and a reproduction will be displayed.
The Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame has lent some of their items for exhibit at the museum, including rodeo cowboy Casey Tibbs’ purple shirt (he was well-known for wearing purple), spurs, bits, and arm bands (predecessor to today’s back numbers cowboys wear).
Plans are also underway to devote an area at the museum to local rodeo clown Homer Holcomb. Holcomb, who retired to Red Bluff, had a wooden mule that Growney is having repaired. Holcomb’s family donated his cape, made of tapestry, his costumes, jeans, and one of his award saddles. Holcomb worked many famous rodeos, including Madison Square Gardens and the Round-Up.
Once the renovations are done, she would like to see the museum rented out for service club organization meeting and educational seminars.
A projector, drop down screen and educational kiosks will be added, and plans to raise funds for them include a raffle for a Cactus saddle with the Round-Up logo on it. Two hundred tickets priced at $50 each will be sold for the raffle.
Growney hopes to have museum renovations complete before the Round-Up’s 100th anniversary, which will be in 2021.
For more information or to volunteer with the museum work, contact the Round-Up office at 530.527.1000 or visit the website at www.RedBluffRoundup.com.