North Platte Travel Guide 2023 | 9
Arts & CULTURE CONT.
ing $50,000 and with Yanagida’s donation, a total of $102,000 will be directed toward the exhibit, as well as other renovations at the museum. “We were able to renovate a whole section of the muse- um, which almost half of it is the Japanese exhibit,” Griffin said. “We were able to make things look really nice in there, put in new HVAC and all the lighting.” After raising the funds for the exhibit, Griffin said, the museum needed to collect artifacts. The fundraising efforts garnered the interest of area Japanese families and they began contributing the artifacts, pictures and stories. “The pictures were really important because we didn’t have a lot of pictures,” Griffin said. “There were some key artifacts that were really good such as the Kuroki potato sacks.” The Kurokis farmed in the Hershey area, and the sacks have George Kuroki’s name on them. Also donated to the exhibit was a scale used to weigh the potatoes on the Kuroki farm. Another find came when Carpenters Countryside Construction of North Platte was renovating a building. “They were tearing it back to the studs and they found a Nisei Cubs uniform in the wall,” Griffin said. “We looked it up and the baseball team was playing in the late 1930s. They were playing right up to the season before Pearl Harbor happened, then they kind of disappeared.” For more information on the museum, check out the lincoln- countymuseum.org/ website.
JOB VIGIL PHOTO This potato sack was preserved from the George Kuroki potato farm op- eration near Hershey, Nebraska.
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