It was in 1997 that Rena Church opened up the shuttered GAR Hall Museum on Downer Place in downtown Aurora for an historical re-enactor doing some research.
“He said, ‘This is the most important building you have downtown … and it’s closed,'” Church, Aurora’s director of public arts, said.
That was the impetus for the almost 20-year effort to fix the sagging historic building, and reopen the museum to display some of the 2,700 artifacts owned by the city.
That effort comes to fruition Monday, on Memorial Day, when the Grand Army of the Republic Hall and Museum reopens to the public, starting with a ceremony rededicating the hall and museum at 11 a.m. at the Memorial Day Parade reviewing stand in front of the David L. Pierce Art and History Center, 20 E. Downer Place.
Civil War re-enactors of the 36th Illinois Infantry Regiment will post the colors for the ceremony. The Memorial Day Parade begins at noon and the GAR will be open following the parade until 3 p.m.
The GAR Museum is a memorial to area veterans of the Civil War. Built in 1877 and 1878, GAR Memorial Hall, Post 20, was closed in the mid-1990s because of structural concerns.
While work toward reopening the museum started as far back as 2001, Church said the biggest year for the hall was 2008, when exterior work was finished that stabilized the building.
A year later the recession hit, and money for the museum dried up.
Overall, the restoration effort cost about $3.5 million, about 80 percent of which was raised locally. The restoration was assisted by grants from local, state and national organizations. Grants came from the Kane County Riverboat Fund, the Partners in Preservation Chicagoland initiative, American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
Inside the museum are brand new, professional museum displays built by Paul Bluestone and his Chicago-based company that does high-level museum work around the country.
They include Civil War artifacts in the permanent displays, because the GAR was founded as an organization for Civil War veterans.
They are in the main room, called the Angel Room, named after a sculpture of an angel that was in the original museum. That sculpture still is being restored, so will not be in place Monday. But the base is there, and eventually the angel will be restored to the center of the room.
Many of the artifacts have been in storage for almost 20 years, according to Erin Howard, who the city has contracted as the curator of the GAR museum.
Howard has been spending most of her time cataloging and marking the items so they can be used for historical research in the GAR Research Museum housed in the Pierce History Museum across the street from the GAR.
“A lot of what I do is behind the scenes,” Howard said.
But some of it will be in public Monday, when people see displays about African-Americans in the North in the Era of the War, the 8th Illinois Cavalry, the 36th Illinois Volunteer Infantry and Day Elmore, an Aurora 17-year-old who joined the war as a drummer, was promoted to private, fought in several battles, was wounded and eventually died of his wounds.
What the public sees Monday is not the finished product. Officials still are raising money to finish restoring the building and replacing things like the sentry statue that sits atop the building.
The city had a state grant of $750,000 that would have paid to finish the restoration, but it was suspended by Gov. Bruce Rauner shortly after he took office two years ago.
