Soon the land was busy with colleges, universities, and other private archeological digs happening at the ranch. “It seemed like with everybody who would come, they would take the fossils with them to their particular university or museum or wherever, and that's one of the reasons that [my wife] Lisa and I decided to start the museum,” he continued, “to keep the fossils found here on our ranch here in our own town, and showcase them here where they were found, other than out in the world.” The Grand River Museum started in 1998 and currently has up to 28 species of fossils. Stuart says the predominant one is the duck-billed dinosaur, the Edmontosaurus , which was named for the first fossil in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada—the area where it was discovered. There is also a Pachycephalosaurus and Triceratops skull and other fossils found on the ranch, along with scattered, isolated bones from a Tyrannosaurus Rex . “We've never found a complete or articulated skeleton or bones of a T-Rex,” said Stuart. “That's fairly rare.” One of the main goals of the museum is to educate visitors. “That's really what the Grand River Museum is all about; our history of the Grand River,” he said. But the attraction didn’t originally have its prime location. In 2001, a former hardware store on Highway 12 opened up, and the Schmidts jumped at the chance to move in. “That was a huge innovation, because we turned a run-down hardware store into our museum, and it was the old adage of location, location, location,” said Stuart.
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