This might be the best little museum in Idaho, and it’s about to grow again

It’s probably 15 years since I’ve been to the Owyhee County Museum in Murphy, southwest of Boise, when my wife and I used to take our two sons to the annual Outpost Days festival.

I revisited the museum recently and met up with its director Eriks Garsvo, whom I’ve known since he was a student at Kuna High.

I’ve been hearing and seeing a lot about the museum and the changes that have taken place in the past five years since Garsvo, 31, took over as director when he was just 26, and I wanted to see the changes for myself.

The museum has changed — a lot.

A quote and photo of Walter Knott, of Knott’s Berry Farm fame, hangs on the wall in Garsvo’s office.

“We figure that if something interests or amuses us, it’ll probably interest or amuse others,” the quote from Knott reads. “So we get it, whatever it is, and let others enjoy it with us, and you’d be surprised how that helps business.”

That’s the way Garsvo has run the museum in the five years he’s been director. Tractors, trains, a Model T, old neon signs, gas pumps, fire engines. If he sees it and likes it, he adds it to the collection.

“Sometimes I stand back and look around the museum and think, whatever I do here is going to last for a long time,” he said.

Garsvo, who won the 2023 Excellence in Leadership Award from the Idaho Association of Museums, is turning the museum into one of the best museums — if not the best museum — in the state.

“It depends on what you define as best,” said Bob Schaffer, board president of the Owyhee County Historical Society. “But for overall historical displays, it’s right up at the very top.”

A lot of what Garsvo has done at the museum has been cosmetic — new lights, redone floors, knocking down walls, adding walls, rearranging exhibits — and it’s gone a long way toward making it look like a real museum.

But he’s also added a litany of new items since he’s been there: a mural of Silver City, mining displays, including a replica mine tunnel for which he brought in dirt to spread on the floor, an updated railroad display, displays on ferries of the Snake River and ranching, new displays in the old Murphy schoolhouse and a re-creation of a 1920 Homedale gas station.

“When Eriks came here, the museum had really slowed down as far as moving forward in finding history to preserve and getting new stuff brought in,” Schaffer said. “But after Eriks got here, I met with him and heard his ideas, and, I mean, he wore me out listening to him. His mind was moving 90 miles an hour, and mine at most was moving 20. But he is constantly thinking ahead as to what would help the museum, how we can get more people interested.”

Print shop

The latest is a project to build an Owyhee Nugget print shop and new storage building on the grounds.

In December last year, Garsvo drew up plans for the print shop literally on the back of a napkin. In January and February, he put together a business plan for an expansion, and in March, the museum launched the “Dare to Dream: Museum Expansion 2025” campaign to raise money for the print shop and new storage building.

Already, they’ve secured the buildings, donated by R&M Steel of Caldwell, money for displays in the print shop, and electrical and ground work. Garsvo said he hopes to have the print shop open by the museum’s annual Outpost Days festival in 2025.

The print shop has special meaning for Schaffer, who spent most of his career in the printing business, specifically newspaper printing, dating back to the Caldwell News Tribune in the 1950s, the Idaho Press-Tribune in Nampa and eventually the Idaho Statesman for nearly 30 years.

I asked him how excited he is to open the print shop next year.

“I’m not exactly jumping up and down, because I’m too old for that,” Schaffer said. “But I am very, just very excited because that equipment out there has historical value clear back to Silver City.”

Right now, it’s mostly just a display, a bunch of artifacts to look at.

Several printing presses, typesetting equipment, typewriters, desks and vintage letterpress type in cabinets are all jammed into a corner of the main museum.

But when the print shop gets built, there will be room to run the presses just like they were run 100 years ago.

The family of Rodney and Leona Hawes, former owners of the now-defunct Owyhee Nugget newspaper, donated much of the printing equipment, including a 1950 Heidelberg Press, which is still in working condition, thanks to Schaffer, who will pass on his knowledge of running the presses to Garsvo.

Other changes at the museum

Garsvo has created a display in the old 1900 Murphy one-room schoolhouse that sits on the museum property. Doug Rutan donated a 1910 teacher’s desk from Meridian High School and added it to the schoolhouse. Garsvo also found one of the last teachers to teach there and recorded her teaching a class that plays when a visitor enters the building.

The museum grounds also include a gift shop, a library and archives room for research, an old pioneer cabin, a forge, a stamp mill and the Marsing train depot that moved there in 1975. A stage was added to the front of the depot in September, and Garsvo secured grants and donations to paint the depot in its original yellow and brown in the spring.

Garsvo split off a portion of the annex building to include a heated display room for a horse-drawn carriage and other artifacts.

The main room of the annex building is used for bazaars, dances and storage for vehicles, including the fire truck, a couple of tractors, a restored and donated corn binder, covered wagon, sheep wagon and a 1915 Model T. It also holds a replica of a 1920 Homedale service station, including donated gas and oil pumps. A new storage building will allow the museum to store its large equipment and collect even more Owyhee County history.

“I spend money like water, but I always seem to get money, too,” Garsvo said. “I may spend it, but it comes back.”

Funding comes from the county, grants, members and donors. But it’s not just money that’s donated; displays and artifacts from the community flow in, too.

The Murphy-Reynolds-Wilson Fire Department donated a 1960 fire truck; someone donated a real pinball machine (real because it uses pins pushed into the playing surface) from a Silver City saloon; someone donated $10,000 to paint the old Marsing train depot; R&M Steel has donated steel buildings.

When the owners of Owyhee Heating and Cooling closed their location in Nampa, Garsvo, who loves neon, contacted them about donating their neon sign, which now hangs in the annex building.

Constant improvement

It’s that kind of constant improvement and change that’s putting the Owyhee museum on the map.

“We are now having more and more people come to the museum. I mean it’d be people from clear back East,” Schaffer said. “The reputation the museum has generated, even back East, is that it’s the friendliest, most hands-on museum that most people have been in, and that is everybody that comes here. They’re just amazed at how much such a small museum has to offer.”

Garsvo said he’s most gratified when people who donate money see the changes that happen every time they visit.

“People will say, ‘Every time I come out here, there’s something new,’ ” he said. “People don’t mind donating when they see where it’s going.”

Some of the changes are small, such as paved walkways between the buildings, new sprinklers, buried electrical wires and vintage-looking lamp posts lighting the way.

The money that’s donated to the museum goes back into the community, since Garsvo buys from local businesses, such as Kuna Lumber, and hires local workers to do much of the ground and electrical work, framing, building and even rehabilitation of some of the artifacts.

That includes a 103-year-old player piano that was in the Oddfellows Lodge in Silver City. A local man restored it back to working condition and asked only $2,500 to recoup the cost of the parts. Garsvo played the piano and put a video of it on Facebook. Within 48 hours, he raised $2,600 for the parts.

Including Garsvo, the museum has two full-time employees and one part-time employee year-round, unusual for a museum that size.

“We’re very fortunate to do what we do here,” Garsvo said. “The county and the locals and the members have just poured in their support.”

A lot of it has to do with the museum’s young director.

“As far as I’m concerned, I keep telling him, ‘Don’t think you’re going to leave here for a while,’” Schaffer said. “We’re going to make sure he sticks around here for another 10 or 15 years, regardless, even if we have to clip his arms.”

What’s next for the museum?

Garsvo and the board are trying to convince the Owyhee County commissioners to donate or sell them a 4.6-acre parcel of land next to the museum so that Garsvo can expand the museum.

Plans for the new land would include Idaho’s first miniature public railroad. The railroad, a 15-inch gauge track and working train where kids and adults can ride through the desert and hear history of Owyhee County.

A train isn’t a stretch for an Idaho museum, historically speaking. Railroads were a big part of Idaho history and culture back in the day. Murphy was at one time the terminus of the Boise, Nampa & Owyhee Railroad. Garsvo envisions demonstrations of how trains work, how the rails are laid and even a spike-driving contest during Outpost Days.

Future plans include new buildings for display, a permanent arena for the museum’s cattle drive that takes place during Outpost Days and replica miniature Old West Main Street, complete with a saloon and carpenter’s shop and replica Murphy Hotel that has been lost to time.

It all goes back to the Walter Knott mantra that Garsvo lives by.

“Some people might think, ‘Why do you need a train?’ ” Garsvo said. “But I say, ‘Why not?’ ”