Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area and the St. Joseph Museum board and staff have announced that the Museum is the recipient of an Interpretive Grant.

The St. Joseph Museums has made a commitment to bring 15 printed Black Dignity images of the Mary Ellen Everhard collection from the Amon Carter Museum and have them professionally framed in museum-quality materials for exhibition in the Black Archives Museum. The installation of the Images from the Mary Everhard Photographic Collection exhibit will take place later this spring.

The funding provided by this grant will allow for an exhibition of photographs collected by Mary Ellen Everhard at the Black Archives Museum. Everhard ran a photography studio in Leavenworth, Kansas, from 1922 to 1968. She was a gifted studio photographer and a photography archivist. She had the vision to acquire and preserve thousands of negatives taken by four photographers who recorded images of Leavenworth County people and places. For this exhibit, the Black Archives Museum will showcase selected images of African Americans from this amazing collection.

The Freedom’s Frontier Interpretive Grant program was started in 2012. Since then, more than 48 projects have been awarded grant funding. Grant projects have been completed on both sides of the Missouri-Kansas border, in the 41-county region that comprises the heritage area.

Projects awarded grant funding must interpret local history, and connect to one or more of the three major themes of the heritage area: the shaping of the frontier, the Missouri-Kansas Border War, and the enduring struggle for freedom.

Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area is one of 49 heritage areas in the U.S. Heritage areas are nonprofit affiliates of the National Park Service (NPS). They act as coordinating entities between the local organizations telling nationally significant stories and the NPS. Freedom’s Frontier was established as a heritage area on October 12, 2006, when signed into law by President George Bush.

“We are honored that the Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area approved our grant request and supports our efforts to interpret the story of African American history of the Midland Empire at the Black Archives Museum,” said Sara Wilson, executive director of the St. Joseph Museums.