FUNDRAISER SATURDAY NIGHT: Kick up heels, buy pies, save Glenrock history

Rita Redig’s grandparents, rancher Henry Preston and his wife Nettie Miller, homesteaded near Deer Creek Canyon south of Glenrock about 100 years ago.

When Redig was a child she would take a bucket from the cabin, carry it up a hill to the spring, fill it up with water then haul it back to the cabin where people would take a drink using a dipper.

“Everyone used the same dipper,” she said. “No one ever got sick.”

The family built the cabin around 1920, a time when a majority of homes did not have electricity, heat came from a big wood-burning stove in the middle of the room, and people washed their clothes by hand, scrubbing them hard against a washboard to get the dirt out.

“I can look in there and I can see things like they were there when I was a little kid, and be able to reminisce on what we did at the cabin,” Redig said while looking inside her grandparents’ home last week.

A few years ago, the VR Ranch donated the cabin to the Deer Creek Museum.

Redig, a museum volunteer, is trying to preserve her grandparents’ home along with her memories, but there is a problem. 

The museum needs to work on the cabin’s foundation, get it stabilized and then redone, and someone to do it. 

“We don’t have any money to really pay anybody,” Deer Creek Museum Curator Marilyn Nida said. 

“We can’t find anybody to work on it. It’s a struggle,” Redig said.

At one point, the museum hoped it had someone to do the work, – however, then they were given a $25,000 quote to do the work.

Nida said the quote “kind of choked us all.”

“We have had to say, well, we’ll go to plan B. We really don’t have much of a plan B yet,” Redig admitted.

But, hope is not lost.

The Deer Creek Museum is hosting its second annual Barn Dance & Silent Pie Auction July 10. Tickets are $10. Proceeds are going toward work on the cabin.

Redig and Nida said they thought of the idea to put on a dance three years ago when the museum got a new building that sits behind the museum, which is the former Mount Hope Lutheran Church that moved from Kinnear to Glenrock in 1976.

“We opened the door and first thing Rita says, ‘This is a place to do a dance,’” Nida said.

“It’s like, oh my gosh, look at this! We got to initiate this,” Redig said. 

Everybody had so much fun at the first dance and pie auction, the museum decided to put on the event again, she said. 

Byron and Nancy Niesse will be back to perform a variety of music ranging from gospel to country western.

The event will also consist of a dinner. It will probably be barbecue, pulled pork, beans and cole slaw, Redig said.

Dinner starts at 6 p.m., with the dance starting at 7 p.m. at the museum at 935 W. Birch St.

“I’m looking forward to it being an annual event,” Redig said