As Miami University's bicentennial year continues, the Butler County Historical Society is taking part in the celebrations by honoring the university's traditions with a museum exhibit.
The Butler County Historical Society assembled 200 years of Miami history and artifacts and put them on display at Heritage Hall in Hamilton. The focus of the historical society is the history and heritage of Butler County and its region, and the exhibit commemorates Miami's significant anniversary, said Mike Riesenberg, executive director of the Butler County Historical Society.
"We wanted to recognize the accomplishment of (Miami University) being around for 200 years," Risenberg said.
The exhibit is a collection of academic and sports artifacts, half of which were collected by the historical society and half which were loaned by various individuals who collect Miami memorabilia.
The sports items on display feature a football signed by Ben Roethlisberger and his fellow football teammates from his junior year at Miami, a hockey jersey signed by the Miami hockey team from a few years back, a photo of George Riders, a longtime Miami coach of different sports, holding a stopwatch and the actual stopwatch and a personal scrapbook of Miami athletic coach Wilber "Weeb" Eubank.
Some of the academic items on display include a shovel used during the groundbreaking ceremony of Miami Hamilton in 1968, a McGuffey Reader, a few Recensio yearbooks, the oldest dating back to the 1890s and a photo of female students from the Western College for Women on a field trip to Kentucky in the late 1800s.
A focal point of the exhibit is a timeline of Miami University that coincides with a timeline of American history, Riesenberg said.
The timeline, designed by historical society board member Sam Ashworth, consists of three sections - an American history timeline at the top, a Miami history timeline in the center and a timeline of the branch campuses at the bottom, not including the Voice of America Learning Center because of its infancy. The American history timeline dates back to the 1780s and the foundation of the country, and the Miami timeline dates back to the early 1800s during the foundation of the university.
Ashworth said it was his idea to include a timeline in the exhibit, and the timeline would allow the community to be up-to-date as far as Miami's history.
"If you're doing (a project of) the history of something, especially over a 200-year period, making a decision of what time period to focus on seems, to me, to be too limiting," Ashworth said. "A timeline is fitting that way in that it shows a number of things and it shows the development of the university."
Riesenberg said the timeline is unique because it explains the relevance of Miami's history to American history.
"The timelines tell us that this is when JFK was assassinated, and this is what was happening at Miami in the 1960s in that decade," Riesenberg said.
Ashworth said he designed the timeline to be potentially portable, so if he got permission from the Butler County Historical Society, he could give it further life other than the exhibit at Heritage Hall.
"At museums now, it is very hard to get people to come to you," Ashworth said. "Everybody's busy, everybody has other things to do, except for people really interested in history. Audiences at museums have gone down. Instead of continuing to look at (an exhibit) this one way, I want to start taking things out into the public."
For now, the Miami bicentennial exhibit is stationed at Heritage Hall in downtown Hamilton. It was opened to the public April 4 and will stay open until Oct. 1. The exhibit is free to the public and is open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday and 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday.
